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Rahman told Reuters that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had
accepted his resignation.
Unknown hackers breached the computer systems of Bangladesh Bank
and transferred $81 million from its account at the Federal
Reserve Bank of New York to casinos in the Philippines between
Feb. 4 and Feb. 5.
Rahman's resignation came days after the Bangladesh finance
minister said the central bank did not inform him about the
heist, and that he learned of it only a month later when news
first appeared in the media.
"I resigned and the prime minister accepted it," Rahman, a
widely respected banker in his second term at the bank, told
Reuters. He didn't say anything more.
The central bank said earlier that cyber criminals had tried to
withdraw $951 million from its U.S. bank account but the other
transactions were blocked after a typo in one of the
instructions raised red flags.
More than $30 million of the money that was stolen was handed
over in cash to an ethnic Chinese man in Manila, a Philippines
senator looking into the suspected laundering scheme said.
The cyber heist and its global scale has left Bangladesh
officials scrambling to find answers and recover the money that
was lost.
The New York Fed has said its systems were not breached, and it
has been working with the Bangladesh central bank since the
incident occurred.
The incident has also left other banks and businesses around the
world eager to learn more, so they can review their own networks
for signs that they are vulnerable to similar attacks or might
already have been breached.
Rahman's main focus at the central bank was on poverty
alleviation, officials said.
(Additional reporting by Ruma Paul; Writing by Sanjeev Miglani;
Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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