Britain's third-largest lender shut every branch and froze 2.1 million accounts after a four-hour intrusion drained funds in the small hours of Friday. Regulators were not told for nine days. The Daily Ledger has seen the internal breach log.
Lead photo
Dark The Wicked Bank headquarters at 318 Lombard Street, shuttered on Friday evening. Picture: Ledger / staff
The breach began at 02:14 on Friday 6 June. An operator account inside Wicked Bank's payments hub — credentials belonging to a night-shift engineer who was, at the time, asleep in Reading — was used to authorise a cascade of transfers that no human had approved.
By 02:51 the money had moved. By the time the duty team noticed an alert they had muted weeks earlier, the funds were gone: routed through eleven shell accounts and out of the country before the first staff arrived for the morning shift.
"It wasn't a hack in the Hollywood sense. Somebody was simply let in, and we held the door."
Internally, the incident carries the reference WB‑4471. The bank has refused to confirm the loss publicly, but two sources with direct knowledge put it "north of forty million." A third described the figure as "the part we can see."
Trading was halted at 9:07am. Analysts at three City houses cut their rating to ‘sell’ within the hour, citing "a total loss of confidence in the bank’s controls."