Two men have been convicted for their part in trying to pull off a £229m heist at the Sumitomo Mitsui Bank in London.
In one of the biggest attempted bank thefts in Britain, they used hi-tech equipment to try to steal money from the accounts of big businesses.
Hugh Rodley, 61, of Twyning, near Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, and sex shop owner, David Nash, 47, from Durrington, West Sussex, were foiled only at the last minute by the complexities of inter-bank money transfers.
On the early evening of 16 September 2006, two men arrived at the reception desk of the Sumitomo Mitsui Bank in London. One asked for the bank’s security supervisor, Kevin O’Donoghue.
He had a distinctive European, possibly Belgian, accent but the receptionist thought nothing of it. After all, this was the London branch of a major Japanese merchant bank with global interests and investments.
Hugh Rodley
Hugh Rodley, involved in the heist, is a self-styled lord of the manor
What she did not know was that the two men led upstairs by security chief O’Donoghue were expert hackers – and they had come to the bank to implement the first stage of the most audacious, and potentially lucrative, cyber snatch in history.
Police do not know how long the gang had been planning the operation. And those now convicted are certainly not those behind the plan.
When questioned, Kevin O’Donoghue, 34, from Birmingham, claimed that he had been coerced into helping and that his family had been threatened. He later admitted a charge of conspiracy to steal.
CCTV images showed him laughing and joking as he showed the two Belgian cyber-thieves to a terminal in one of the trading offices.
Jan Van Osselaer from Belgium and Gilles Poelvoorde from France, who admitted a charge of conspiracy to steal, had come prepared.
They used a USB memory stick to instal “keylogger” software on various workstations that recorded every button pressed by users.
‘No kingpin’
A few days later, they returned and downloaded the data from the keylogger programmes. They now had the usernames and passwords of every bank employee who had used the infected computers.
But Kevin O’Donoghue had made some mistakes. He had tampered with some of the CCTV cameras – even cutting the wires on one – in an effort to cover the gang’s tracks. Other employees started to wonder why he had started enquiring about creating extra access badges.
Continue Reading
The Rest is Up to You…
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK
The Guide to Getting More Out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
The view from the floor-to-ceiling windows in our room at the new Wynn Encore provides a distressingly clear picture of what’s going on in Las Vegas these days. To the south, there’s a casino project that has ground to a halt, half built, its steel skeleton an outline of a multibillion-dollar dream gone hungry. Across the street, there’s a Modernist chapel, a lonely vigil of virtue on the Strip — people seek salvation elsewhere in this town. Look west toward the mountains and you can trace the Vegas real estate developers’ dash toward the horizon with building projects. Now as far as you can drive, there are foreclosed homes and empty new developments offering come-ons to prospective buyers.
The Encore, which opened officially in January, stands like a luxurious monument of defiance to the recession. It is not; it cannot. Wynn Resorts boss Steve Wynn has cut room rates to as little as $169 a night — the original projected rates were something on the order of $350 — but he won’t cut service. That act of defiance means the Encore is a pretty astonishing value for any visitors in the mood to treat themselves to a Las Vegas fling in these tough times. The $2 billion, 2,034-room project adjoins the Wynn — the hotels are connected by a retail alley — completing Steve Wynn’s most recent move to reposition the Las Vegas mind-set. The man who brought you exploding volcanoes (the Mirage), pirate ships (Treasure Island) and over-the-top light shows, not to mention a zillion dollars’ worth of fine art (the Bellagio) has now fully assembled his antidote to overstimulation, which began with the Wynn Las Vegas in 2005. Here is a different kind of sensibility — dare we say classy? — a resort with gaming, rather than a gaming resort.
At ground level, the Encore, like its older sibling, is still all business, though Wynn had his decorator, Roger P. Thomas, nod to the Las Vegas of the past. The casino floor is dominated by a color that the company says used to be standard in casinos in the bad old good old days — just call it whorehouse red. But it works here, with the brilliant red chandeliers, the whole effect muted a bit by judicious use of off-white fabric. The other delicate touches are cast, oddly enough, by natural light streaming in from either end of the casino floor. And not only through windows — the main entrance to the Encore casino takes you through a lush, plant-and-tree-filled atrium over three stories tall. There’s a certain amount of whimsy at play here too: for instance, the brightly colored butterflies inlaid into the mosaic floors. It makes the contemplation of losing at the tables almost pleasant.
In an interview with nightlife king Steve Lewis, Scott Osman Breaks it down:
Steve Lewis: What do you think of the club scene in New York City right now?
Scott Osman: I think it sucks. The whole bottle service thing ruined nightlife. After my experience at Marquee, I was dumbfounded. I’m sitting there running lights (and there’s no fog machine because of the new requirements for the fire protection system) and there are all these people who feel so entitled. We had 1,000 kids at N.A.S.A every week, and no one ever caused a fight—different people from different backgrounds getting together and nobody fought—and these people go out and they think they’re extra special because they’ve got a bottle. But aside from the bottle service problem, the other issue relating to why things are a little slower now is that you have these DJ agents, like Paul Morris from AM Only, and they literally would take these DJs out of our rave scene that were getting paid like $500 to $1,000, and they would add zeroes. Managers are obviously going to promote the artists as best as they can, but in doing so, they shot themselves in their own feet. It’s simple math. My friends, Scott Henry, all of them—they’re making a lot of money, they have nice houses, and that’s fine for them—but at the same time, they out price themselves out of the rave market. Plus, the raves are getting busted, and you have to move the DJs into the clubs, and the clubs could afford to pay the deposits, so the supply and the demand kept up, but it just changed the industry, and so it killed the rave scene in a way. If you’re a DJ, it all boils down to whether can you pull 100 people into a club, and then get paid. That’s just supply and demand … its like battle of the bands. You have to bring people.
Also:
Steve Lewis: So you started out as a tech person in the club and picked up information as you went along that eventually helped you to become an owner?
Scott Osman: Yeah, I was producing parties to help promote my light shows, and it was a symbiotic relationship. And then N.A.S.A. was obviously in the movie Kids—Chloe Sevigny was my coat-check door girl and Harmony Korine would come there and Harold Hunter, and all the other Kids.
Steve Lewis: Harold Hunter was an actor in Kids and he passed away a couple years ago.
Scott Osman: I actually saw Leonardo DiCaprio at the Inaugural Ball, and I brought it up. I asked him if he went to Harold’s funeral because he knew Harold from that whole little circle, but he was really busy looking for his cufflinks that he had dropped, so he couldn’t really talk to me.
A lull in the drug-related violence that has gripped the region was shattered yesterday with the discovery of six corpses in three locations in Tijuana and Tecate.
The victims included three men whose mutilated corpses were found with a message near the U.S. border fence in Playas de Tijuana; two 16-year-old girls whose decomposed bodies were found off a road south of downtown Tecate; and a man whose body was found wrapped in a blanket on the side of a road in a central part of the Tijuana.
The sudden drop-off in violence since mid-January had led to reports of a truce between drug traffickers feuding for control of the region’s domestic market and smuggling routes to the United States. But the shifting scenario raises the question of whether the renewed violence could be connected to recent arrests of suspected gang members in Tijuana by members of Mexico’s Federal Police.
Drug gangs use killings as a way of punishing suspected informants and warning enemies. A message left with the three bodies found with their heads and limbs cut off was addressed to “balcon” – a word meaning blabbermouth.
