A college student in Taitung County, surnamed Chen (陳), who wanted to take NT$1,000 out of his post office account mistakenly withdrew NT$5,000 from a post office ATM on Monday, and then left the excess in the cash slot in the belief that the money would be returned to his account.
According to the post office where the incident occurred, its staff put in five hours of overtime trying to track Chen down and return the money to his account.
The Chinese-language United Daily News quoted Chen as saying in a telephone interview that he had been unsure about taking the unwanted money, and thought that the money would simply go back into the ATM’s cash supply.
The paper quoted the post office staff as saying that they were surprised when they found the ATM had NT$4,000 more than it should when they were doing the day’s final accounts. They started to go through the ATM records item by item as well as searching its video surveillance footage.
The United Daily News reported that the post office workers spent almost five hours going through the records and surveillance footage before deciding to concentrate on all the people who had withdrawn NT$5,000 or more and calling them to see if they had left the money in the cash slot.
About 10pm that night, Chen was identified and the money was restored to his account, the United Daily News reported.
The post office staff said that they were relieved to have finally found Chen.
The post office said ATMs cannot take back unwanted bills, so it urged people to take all the money they have withdrawn, adding that usually in such incidents, if the owner of the left cash cannot be identified, the money is placed in a public account.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods