The Lazarus Heist: From Hollywood to High Finance: Inside North Korea's Global Cyber War by Geoff White

Author:Geoff White [White, Geoff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241554289
Google: XjtCEAAAQBAJ
Published: 2022-06-09T05:25:36+00:00

10

Baccarat Binge

It’s time to shift location again. This time we’re heading down the coast on Manila Bay, to a casino called the Solaire. It sits right on the waterfront, prime real estate overlooking the bay. It’s a gleaming white building, twelve storeys high, sticking up like a shark’s tooth from the flatlands of the shoreline.

Up on the first floor, Tony Lau is in the middle of his shift.1 He’s a VIP host, and it’s his job to look after the casino’s richest customers. It’s February 2016, the week after computer hackers set out to steal a billion dollars from Bangladesh Bank. But Lau doesn’t know about any of that. He’s just looking forward to a rest.

The last few days had been absolutely crazy. It was the Lunar New Year, one of Asia’s biggest holidays and a hectic time for the casino. Lau’s hoping things will start getting back to normal, when half a dozen men speaking Chinese walk into his VIP area. He’s worked in the industry for years, and he instantly feels there’s something off about these new customers.

‘Their appearance was just really ordinary,’ he remembers. ‘The way they dressed didn’t make them seem genuine. They just didn’t look like people who had lots of money.’

Not like the kind of customers Lau’s used to serving, with their fancy cars and designer clothes. He says that, once, a client pitched up with a deposit of 200m Philippine pesos – that’s $10m. As you can imagine, when you’re paying that kind of money, you expect top-quality service. It’s Lau’s job to roll it out.

‘The VIP room is like a luxurious house,’ he says. ‘There’s a lounge area, a dining table, a mini-bar with food and beverages on demand. They have their own bathroom. So everything feels really special.’

Such perks are reserved only for the casino’s most valued customers. But that’s the problem – Lau can’t help feeling that the Chinese men who’ve walked into his VIP area just aren’t … Very Important. But it turns out that his first impression is wrong. He soon starts to realize these guys are absolutely loaded. Behind the scenes in the VIP area is the ‘cage’ – a highly secure room where the customers’ money is taken and changed into chips for gambling. After the men arrive, the cage starts to fill up.

‘Suddenly the money they are here to gamble appears,’ says Lau. ‘And it’s all in cash. It took them a while to count it all. There were stacks and stacks of cash, high like a mountain. And, as the host, I am thinking: “Wow, this group is very rich. Brilliant.”’

Lau’s impressed, but suspicious at the same time. The money doesn’t seem right, because these men aren’t regulars. ‘Our VIP guests are usually high-profile people. So we would know their background. But who are these people? How come they have so much money? We have never heard of them.’

It’s when the men start playing that Lau and his colleagues notice some really strange things. For a start they seem to treat gambling like a regular day job.

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