Cash vanishes from bank accounts

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-05-22 11:41

SHANGHAI: You think your money tucked away in the bank account is safe? Think again.

Not one or two, but dozens of people in Ningbo, Zhejiang province, recently discovered that their hard-earned savings mysteriously disappeared from their bank accounts on May 9 and 10, local police said yesterday.

An officer with the Ningbo municipal public security bureau told China Daily that the cases were under investigation and declined to reveal the number of victims and the total amount stolen.

Xu Jia, a 26-year-old businessman, told Qianjiang Evening News that 150,000 yuan ($22,000) went missing from his Agriculture Bank of China account on May 10.

Xu first received a message on his mobile phone at 9:05 am on May 10 informing him that 20,000 yuan had been withdrawn from his account. "I received similar messages again and again within a matter of minutes till I had only 54.86 yuan left in my account," he said.

The bank told Xu that the money was withdrawn in Shenzhen, which he found hard to believe as his debit card was with him and he "hadn't been to the city lately".

He asked the bank to return his money. The request was turned down.

A vice-director of the bank's Ningbo branch, surnamed Hu, told the Qianjiang Evening News that the bank will compensate the victim after police investigations are over.

Hu claimed the theft was carried out through a scam called "card copying".

Scammers use some technological facility to steal the card's data when the cardholder uses it at a particular ATM, Hu explained. "The data is copied to another card, which is then used to withdraw money from the account."

"Photographs of the suspects withdrawing money at the ATMs have been obtained and handed over to the police," he said.

In February, a dozen-odd people in Hangzhou, capital city of Zhejiang province, had similar complaints that money had disappeared from their bank accounts.