Even plastic surgery to help hide her identity couldn't keep persistent authorities from finally tracking down a bank teller who stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from her employer more than 25 years ago. Vice reports on the story out of China, which starts in 1997 in Yueqing. At that time, the woman—IDed by authorities under a pseudonym, Chen Yile—was a 26-year-old teller for China Construction Bank. Per a release from Yueqing prosecutors, Chen stumbled upon a loophole in the bank's computer system that allowed her to manually tweak the amount of money in customers' accounts.
Once she realized this, Chen applied for a transfer to another branch that was closed on the weekends and snuck into that building on April 12 of that year, a Saturday, prosecutors say. That's when she modified her own accounts so that she now had more than $834,000 to her name, per the release. Prosecutors say she then visited other bank branches around the city, withdrawing a total of $587,000 in cash. She reportedly hid $211,000 in various spots around her parents' home, deposited $310,000 into accounts she shared with her siblings, and fled the area—but not before she stopped at a plastic surgeon's office and had unknown cosmetic work done, apparently to try to hide her identity.
Her own father gave her up to police, but she'd already vanished. She obtained a fake ID registered to Guizhou province, though she eventually landed hundreds of miles away in Guangdong province, where she eventually remarried, had a child, bought a house, and established a cleaning supplies company that did quite well, prosecutors say. She was busted in December, however (authorities aren't saying how they found her), and her new family is said to have had no clue about her crimes. The money Chen took with her on the road is long gone, she says in a statement, but thanks to the success of her company, she says she'd like to return what she stole, per Bloomberg.
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She also revealed she did miss the family she abandoned more than a quarter-century ago. Bloomberg notes she named her company after a Chinese poem that reads: "Every festive day, we think more than ever of our relatives far away." Chen—who was charged with identity fraud, corruption, and bigamy—also appears to have gained some fans who admire how resourceful she was. "Having such courage at 26 years old, taking care of all her siblings, and even successfully starting a business ... What talent," one commenter wrote on Weibo, per Vice. (More fraud stories.)
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