A global financial fraud scheme that uses an active and passive automated transfer system to siphon money from high balance accounts in financial institutions has been discovered by McAfee and Guardian Analytics.

According to a joint report released overnight, the online fraud, dubbed "Operation High Roller," attacks banking systems worldwide and has impacted thousands of financial institutions including credit unions, large global banks and regional banks. The criminals have attempted to transfer between 60 million euros (US$75.1 million) and 2 billion euros (US$2.5 billion) to mule business accounts belonging to the "organized crime" syndicate from at least 60 banks so far, the study revealed.

"The advanced methods discovered in Operation High Roller show fraudsters moving toward cloud-based servers with multi-faceted automation in a global fraud campaign," David Marcus, director of security research for McAfee Labs, said in a blog post.

Read more of "Operation High Roller achieves 'organized crime' status" at ZDNet Asia.