Authorities in Bangladesh claim to have identified 20 individuals connected with the theft of $81m in government funds that ended up flowing through casinos in the Philippines.

On Monday, Bangladeshi police announced that they’d identified “at least 20 people from multiple foreign countries” that had played a role in February’s digital theft of $81m from Bangladesh central bank accounts held in the Federal Reserve Bank in New York.

The money was transferred from New York to a Manila branch of the Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation (RCBC) and was subsequently transferred – despite desperate ‘stop payment’ orders from Bangladesh – to remittance firm Philrem Services Inc, which passed the funds on to two Chinese junket operators doing business with two Philippine casinos.

The Bangladeshi authorities declined to provide more info on the 20 suspects except to say that they included “Filipino, Sri Lankan and Chinese nationals.” Some Sri Lankan media outlets reported that 12 of the 20 were Philippine nationals while the rest were Sri Lankans. In addition to the $81m sent to the Philippines, the hackers had attempted to transfer $20m to Sri Lanka but officials managed to halt this payment in time.