A businesswoman deposited the equivalent of almost US$2 million at a branch of China’s largest bank, but only US$20 remained after most of it was transferred without her authorization, state media reported.
Wang Li (王麗) was one of several victims of a scam, involving millions of dollars, at a branch of state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) in Shijiazhuang, highlighting increasingly sophisticated financial crime.
A branch executive persuaded her to put 10.8 million yuan (US$1.7 million) in a one-year deposit program offering interest rates more than three times the norm, China News Service reported yesterday.
However, when she checked her account earlier this month, it held only 124 yuan, it said.
She had never used the online banking security device she was given when she opened the account, the report said, but was later told that the device had a different serial number to the one she had signed for, implying that the genuine one may have been used to access her funds.
Dozens of other depositors made similar complaints, with the sums of cash involved amounting to “tens of millions of yuan,” China News Service said.
It was not clear whether ICBC would compensate customers who have fallen victim to the scam.
ICBC official Sun Shifeng denied the branch had lured depositors with illegally high interest rates, adding it had reported the incidents to police, the report said.
Banking scams are rife in China, sometimes involving bank employees.
Zhang Jing (張淨) sued the Agricultural Bank of China in the southwestern city of Chongqing after an employee transferred more than 1.2 million yuan out of his and his wife’s accounts, but during the proceedings, he was arrested rather than the culprit.
He was convicted of fraud in 2007, fined 100,000 yuan and sentenced to four years in prison, only to finally be cleared on appeal by a higher court late last year, the Changjiang Times reported in January.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema