Learning English

Bangladesh's missing millions

Hackers have stolen $100m from Bangladesh's foreign currency reserves causing the country's government embarrassment. In this video, Neil and Rob talk about the story and bring you some useful related language which appears on news sites around the world.

Language challenge

Which of these verbs does NOT mean 'to resign'?

a) to quit

b) to sack

c) to step down

Watch the video and complete the activity

The story

The head of the central bank in Bangladesh has resigned after hackers stole more than $100m from the country's foreign currency reserves in an audacious cyber heist that's hugely embarrassed the government.

Unknown hackers breached the computer systems of the central bank in Bangladesh and transferred the money to casinos in the Philippines in early February.

Ushma Mistry - BBC Asian Network

Described as an audacious cyber heist, this has hugely embarrassed the Bangladeshi government.

Hackers got into the computer systems of the central bank in Bangladesh and transferred the money from its account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to casinos in the Philippines last month.

The chief of the bank, Atiur Rahman, handed in his resignation to the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina after coming under criticism for the theft.

Some of the money's been recovered from Sri Lanka but most of it's still missing.

Key words and phrases

central bank
a national bank which has control of a country's money 

audacious
carried out with confidence despite high risk

breached
(here) broke into

heist
an organised robbery – usually involving large amounts of money or valuable objects

cyber
prefix used to refer to computers or the internet

hush up
prevent people from discovering the truth

Downloads

You can download the audio and a PDF document for this episode here.

Language challenge - answer

The answer is: b) to sack. This means to make someone else unemployed

More

Learn more about this story with BBC News.

End of Session 2

Join us in Session 3 for Lingohack - our video which teaches you words from the news using the latest BBC World News bulletins.