According to ‘The Times the signal was resold by a provider of the Bank of England to’ trading ‘firms. It is investigating what investment funds are behind
The Bank of England has confirmed Thursday the investigation of The Times has brought to light in which it rebels that the audio signal of the press conferences of the institution was hacked so that some funds had for a few seconds privileged information with which they made operations instantly with which they took millions of euros. Taking advantage of the delay in the signal the high-frequency operators who accessed it without permission thanks to the bad practices of a supplier, thus obtaining an advantage over the market as a whole.
“We have detected that an external provider of the Bank of England has improperly used the audio transmission of some press conferences of the entity since the beginning of the year to provide services to other external customers,” said the institution chaired by Mark Carney.
After the finding, first denounced by the newspaper, the Bank of England has disabled access from this provider, which has no longer had access to the most recent press conferences of the entity, in addition to not being able to play any role again in the future at the press conferences of the central bank of the United Kingdom.
According to ‘The Times’, access to this audio source, which is used as a backup for transmissions in the event of a cut in the video signal, was resold by the Bank of England provider to signatures of high-frequency trading (HFT).
Customers of this supplier paid between 2,500 and 5,000 pounds (2,929 and 5,858 euros) for each press conference they wanted to access with seconds of advantage over the market, a possibility that, according to the newspaper, was also offered in the case of Similar events of the European Central Bank (ECB), Federal Reserve of the United States and the Bank of Canada.
“This totally unacceptable use of the audio source was without the knowledge or consent of the Bank, and is being investigated further,” added the Bank of England.