Hackers Seek Smaller Amounts 3 Years After $100 Million Heist

Three years after hackers managed to siphon off more than $100 million from the Bangladeshi central bank’s account in the U.S. Federal Reserve, cyber-criminals are going smaller.

In 2018, attempted fraudulent transactions ranged from $250,000 and $2 million, down from tens of millions of dollars in the previous two years, interbank messaging system Swift said in a report Wednesday. Almost all fraudulent transactions — 83 percent — were sent to banks in the Asia-Pacific region, while the targeted lenders were mostly located in countries rated highly corrupt by international regulators, Swift said. Tajikistan, Mozambique and Afghanistan topped those rankings in 2018.

“The higher the value of the instruction, the higher the risk of triggering fraud-detection systems,” Swift said in the study. “Since the cyber-incident in Bangladesh, the amounts sent in individual fraudulent transactions has evolved, making them harder to detect.”