Inside the Lazarus Heist: Multi-Billion Dollar Theft in Two Hours

In 2018, a group of men in Maharashtra state of India was tricked into being unwitting participants in a major bank heist. The men, who believed they were being offered small roles in a Bollywood film, were in fact being used as money mules to collect cash in a fraudulent scheme. 

The target of the heist was Cosmos Co-operative Bank, which is based in Pune.

On a quiet Saturday afternoon in August of that year, staff in the bank’s head office began to receive a series of alarming messages from Visa, the US-based card payment company. 

Visa warned that it was detecting thousands of requests for large cash withdrawals from ATMs, all apparently made by people using Cosmos Bank cards. However, when the bank’s staff checked their own systems, they could find no evidence of abnormal transactions. 

Despite this, about half an hour later, the bank’s management decided to play it safe and authorized Visa to halt all transactions from Cosmos Bank cards. Unfortunately, this delay would ultimately prove extremely costly. 

The following day, Visa shared a full list of suspect transactions with the Cosmos head office. The bank was stunned to learn that around 12,000 separate withdrawals had been made from ATMs across the globe, totaling nearly $14m in losses. 

This incident serves as a stark

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