Billion Dollar Heist

In February 2016 an attempt was made to withdraw a billion dollars from the Bangladesh Bank's account in New York. The instructions were sent through the interbank messaging system and looked genuine. Most of the money was stopped at the last moment; eighty-one million dollars reached the Philippines and disappeared. The documentary describes the theft and the method behind it: what was broken was not a vault but a system of trust. Daniel Gordon's film tells the case not as a single robbery but as where cybercrime has arrived, following a line that runs from credit card fraud to state-backed groups. Among those speaking are the security researcher Mikko Hyppönen and the former FBI agent Keith Mularski. The most striking part of the film is not how the system was broken but how many institutions noticed nothing for months. Eighty-five minutes, and the pace does not drop.