A plush job with a salary over $80k wasn’t enough for this Swedbank employee, suspected of doing more than just “overtime” from his place of work.
A Swedish banker was arrested on charges of selling drugs over the darknet from his office computer late last week. An employee of Swedbank, the 35-year-old man allegedly used his office at the bank in Stockholm as the center of operations, confirming orders and packing drugs during the night when the building was empty.
Police were apparently tipped off about the employee’s strange behavior by Aftonbladet, a Swedish language news publication that had secretly been investigating the employee for weeks. According to journalists at the site, the banker sold drugs primarily on the Flugsvamp 3.0 darknet market.
As a banker, the man is believed to have earned around 700,000 krona per year, or $81,000 USD. The proceeds from his drug vendor operation appear to have netted the employee millions of additional krona in income. Coworkers and even managers assumed the suspect was simply dedicated to putting in several hours-worth of “overtime” at the bank each week, noting nothing otherwise suspicious about his behavior.
“Hope it was the bank’s IT that sounded the alarm,” commented one member of a Swedish language forum. “Otherwise, there is reason to wonder about IT security at the bank and how much shit is already in the system… They’re just waiting for the bank’s customers to have problems.”
Swedish police were also provided with data that indicates the suspect used an encrypted, peer-to-peer communication network known as Encrochat, which was popular among cybercriminals in Europe. Encrochat’s servers were seized earlier this year, giving law enforcement agencies worldwide access to information which has already led to the arrest of hundreds of suspected criminals across the continent.