You know in video games when you press a load of buttons and instantly get a load of cash? Well, this happened in real life for one very clever 44-year-old man named Qin Qisheng that managed to withdraw over 7 million Yuan due to an ATM loophole found in his employer, Huaxia Bank.
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According to the South China Morning Post, the bank’s system did not properly record the withdrawals made around midnight and in turn, sent out the money without deducting it from the user’s account. The bank should have been notified that the transaction had failed but Qisheng coded in scripts that suppressed the alerts.
Qisheng began the task of exploiting these withdrawals in November 2016 and only after 1358 withdrawals later, did the bank caught on and he was arrested.
The bank at first did not want to press charges. Qisheng returned the money and in order to avoid bad publicity, the bank wanted to drop the case. Qisheng’s defence was that he was simply testing the bank’s security and was just holding onto the money for the time being.
The court refused to drop the case and Qisheng is looking at 10 years in prison after losing his case. Investigations revealed that Qisheng had already moved the money into another account as well as began investing it in the stock market so when he pleaded his “testing the service” argument, it clearly hit a wall.
