The idea is simple, you make money, and you want to protect it. You know that keeping it under your mattress isn't the safest route because your house could get broken into or burn down. You could entrust it with a friend, but the next thing you know it's all gone because he took everything to Las Vegas with the promise that he would double up... Better yet, you build a massive vault in your backyard, convert all the cash into coinage and proceed to dive into it regularly like Scrooge McDuck in Duck Tails. However, the first time you do that, it becomes evident that metal coins don't behave like water molecules and now your neck is broken in three places and you're living off a feeding tube. 

It seems like the only way to stash your hard-earned cash is in a bank. Banks have those impressive vault doors, which are always open when you enter the bank for some odd reason. They have armed guards walking around, and there is a museum-like quietness about the interior where no one is talking, and it gives off vibes of ultra security. 

Convinced that your money is safe, you deposit your cash, walk out, and go about your day 100% certain that nothing can happen to your money while you're not looking at it. 

The truth is that once your money goes into a bank. It goes to work... not in the traditional sense, but your bank is using your money to issue loans, pay off debts, extend lines of credit, collect interest, and a bunch of other things. The dollar bill you give the bank is NOT the same dollar bill you get back when you withdraw it. And who cares? A dollar is a dollar, if you get all them back when you ask for them. 

In today's financial system, money is nothing more than 1's and 0's stored in a database somewhere and your cash values are mere numbers that get thrown about with a scary amount of alacrity. To make matters more interesting, your money doesn't really exist. It can be magnified or depleted at any moment and while banks worldwide do everything in their power to keep nefarious players from breaking into the bank via the internet and causing all sorts of havoc. Some nefarious players are so good at what they do, they can transfer large sums of money into their own accounts. 

Large sums of money like...

Thousands

Hundreds of thousands

Millions

What about a BILLION!?

In today's episode, Ed is going to take us down rabbit hole of the seedy underbelly of the hacking world where a handful of mysterious computer nerds crafted a way to break into the U.S. Federal Reserve, find, and transfer up to $1 billion to off shore accounts across the globe and they managed to pull it off in the course of a weekend and a Chinese New Year, and a bit of luck.

This episode is exploring what goes into what is considered the greatest bank heist in history and who was responsible for it. The answer may shock you!