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A BANK clerk who made off with £400,000 and had plastic surgery to conceal her identity has finally been caught 25 years later.
Chen Yile, a pseudonym used by the Chinese authorities, concealed her ID and ghosted her family to build a new life in a different province with a new husband and daughter.
Chinese authorities eventually tracked down Chen Yile after 25 years[/caption]
She has now been charged with corruption and fraud after she was arrested in December, prosecutors in the city of Yueqing said in a WeChat post this week.
Chen confessed to all her crimes and expressed remorse when she was caught, prosecutors said.
In 1997, the then 26-year-old employee of the Yueqing City branch of China Construction Bank discovered a flaw in the bank’s system where she could freely edit the amount of money in an account and withdraw the cash.
When Chen learned of a staff shortage at one of the bank’s nearby branches, which she knew would be closed at the weekends, she volunteered to be transferred there.
She put her plan into action on April 12, 1997, when she sneaked into the empty bank and keyed in new figures into her bank accounts, adding a total of 5.66million yuan (£673,000).
Chen then made her way to the city district with a suitcase, stopping at a number of bank branches and withdrew a total of 3.98m yuan (£473,000).
She also visited a clinic which offered cosmetic procedures and went under the knife.
It is unclear what procedures she had.
She then returned to her parents’ home with the cash and concealed 1.43m yuan (£170,000) in various places around the house, including an outside toilet.
Chen then started travelling south with the remaining money and went to a bank in the neighbouring Fujian province.
She deposited 2.1m yuan (£25,000) into newly opened joint bank accounts shared with her three siblings.
Three days later she paid a secret visit to her parents’ home and revealed to her family where she had hidden the money and left behind four passbooks for them to withdraw more cash.
She ignored her dad’s advice to surrender to the police.
Once she had left her parents’ home, her father reported her to the authorities and handed over the passbooks and hidden cash to the police, the local justice department said.
Despite efforts to bring her to justice, Chen simply vanished.
She had though travelled to Shanghai with 400,000 yuan (£4,700) where she managed to get a new ID card with the help of a middleman and adopted the identity as Jiang, and registered to the Guizhou province in southwest China – just more than a 1,000 miles from her real hometown.
Ultimately, she settled in the coastal province of Guangdon in southeast China, where she started her new life.
In the following 25 years under her new identity, she became a successful entrepreneur and founded a cleaning supplies company.
She also remarried and had a daughter, ghosting her first husband following the theft.
Her new family is thought to have had no idea about her past until she was caught in December.
Chen is now facing charges of corruption, identity fraud and getting remarried without ending her previous marriage.
The Yueqing People’s Procuratorate said in their post: “For 25 years, investigators never gave up on arresting Chen,” adding it had worked with other government departments in order to track her down.
It did not reveal exactly how this was done.
It is also not clear if the loophole in the country’s banking system has been fixed.
The bizarre story has got social media users mostly impressed with Chen’s resourcefulness.
One commentator on Weibo wrote: “Putting aside the criminal element, this is the script for how a female protagonist changed her life.”.
Another said: “Having such courage at 26 years old, taking care of all her siblings, and even successfully starting a business… What talent.”
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