Adonis Diaries

Embezzling a multinational financial corporation: “Girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo”

The heroine Salander, the young girl in the novel “Girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo” managed to hack into the hard drive of Wennerstrom Swedish multinational financial corporation and has spent days and long hours studying and analyzing the routes of the various complex transactions.

Wennerstrom was confident that the State of Sweden will never investigate his corporation and confiscate his hard drive, and he didn’t contemplate burning the hard drive into a new hard drive for his new performing computer, or even burn it into CD…

Salander is now in total control of a mirror hard drive saved in a commercial server in Holland. Read the process in https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/part-1-hacking-a-multinational-financial-corporation-girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo/

Salander decided that all the $billion should be transferred to her own account.  She understood that the assets were of three kinds:

1. The fixed Swedish asset, which was squarely available to public scrutiny

2. Assets in post-office-box companies in locations such as Gibraltar, Cyprus, and Macao ( a sort of clearing house for illegal mafia businesses in laundering money generated from drugs, weapons, sex, slave trade…)

3. An anonymous account in the Cayman Islands: Every 1% of every deal made in laundering money would be siphoned into that account via the post-office-box companie

Salander bought two faked passports and rented suites at two luxury hotels in Zurich (Switzerland). She walked to the venerable Zimertal Hotel costing 22,000 kronors a day, and paid 210 kronors for a bagel and two cups of coffee at the bar.

By 10 am, Salander punched in her mobile the number of a modem uplink in Hawaii.  She replied by punching in a 6-digit code and texting a message containing instructions to start a program.

In Honolulu, the program came to life on an anonymous home page on a server officially located at the university.  The program function was to just start another program on another server located in Holland.

The new program was to look for the “mirror image hard drive” belonging to Wennerstrom and to take command of the program showing 3,000 bank accounts around the world.

Any change in Wennerstrom’s accounts shows only on the mirror hard drive and the user will never notice that the actual money was indeed transferred.

Salander walked in the Bank Hauser General in Zürich for her appointment with Herr Wagner, the general manager. Herr Wagner pigeon-holed Salander as a spoiled daughter or the mistress of a big financial shot… Salander said: “There are a number of accounts at the bank of Kroenenfeld in the Cayman Islands.  Automatic transfer can be done by sequential clearing codes…” and she recited several series of 16-digit numbers  without referring to any papers (She has a photographic memory). Herr Wagner cashed 4% commission on the transactions.

Salander changed to a more normal look and outfits and met with Herr Hasselmann at the Bank Dorffmann.  She opened an account and converted a few private bonds. She then opened 5 numbered accounts which she could access via Internet and which were owned by an anonymous postal box company in Gibraltar that a broker had set it up for 50,000 kronor. Each of the 50 bonds was worth one million kronor.

Salander booted up her PowerBook and uplinked to the Net through her mobile.  She emptied the numbered accounts that were opened at Bank Dorffmann and divided the money up into small amounts and used them to pay invoices for a large number of fictional companies around the world.

When she was done, the money was transferred back to the Cayman bank, but to a different account from the one the money was withdrawn.

Salander made one payment from the Cayman account to her anonymous company “Wasp Enterprises” registered in Gibraltar.  The next day, Salander deposited the private bonds from the Cayman bank into 9 private banks in Zurich.

By 3 pm, Salander had converted 10% of the bonds into cash, a sum she deposited in 30 numbered accounts.  The rest of the bonds she bundled up and put in a safe-deposit box.

Billion were transferred before Wennerstrom could discover that he is penniless.

Salander burned every trace of her visit to Zürich, papers, wigs, cloths…

Note: The other two tomes of the Millenium series by Stieg Larsson  were published posthumously. I think the first novel The “Girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo” was the best of the three.