The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Westpac was left red-faced when it accidentally set the wrong overdraft limit on one Leo Gao’s account in 2009, resulting in the New Zealand service station owner fleeing to China with NZ$6.7 million in his pocket. Leo was however tracked down and sentenced to four years in jail for theft.
Last Wednesday, Malaysian Christine Jiaxin Lee, 21, a student in Sydney was arrested while trying to board a flight back to Malaysia, after obtaining an emergency passport. She was charged with overdrawing A$4.6 million from her Westpac account.
Lee, who was studying chemical engineering, had opened the account in 2012 and was accidentally given an unlimited overdraft facility by Westpac.
The report said she realised this only in 2014 but never informed the bank and, over the space of a year, allegedly made withdrawals totalling A$4,653,333.02.
Lee has been charged with dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception, and knowingly dealing with the proceeds of crime.
However, magistrate Lisa Stapleton expressed scepticism about the case last Thursday, remarking that it was the bank that had given Lee the unlimited overdraft and that the student had merely used that credit. “It isn’t proceeds of crime. It’s money we all dream of,” Stapleton was reported to have said.
If this is the case, Lee would need to pay the money back but wouldn’t have necessarily broken the law.
The case of Gao however, known in New Zealand as the “accidental millionaire”, was different, the report said.
In April 2000, Gao applied for a $NZ100,000 overdraft on his Westpac account to help spruce up his struggling service station in Rotorua before selling it.
However, a Westpac worker accidentally placed the decimal point in the wrong spot and inadvertently gave him a NZ$10 million overdraft instead.
Gao and his girlfriend Kara Hurring told friends they were going on holiday, left a note at the service station to say it had gone under, and skipped the country, the Sydney Morning Herald report said.
Gao transferred $NZ6.7 million to various accounts in China, Hong Kong and Macau before Westpac froze his accounts two weeks after the blunder. He was arrested by Interpol two and a half years later when trying to enter Hong Kong from China.
The bank recovered about NZ$3 million and Gao, who was reportedly released from jail in 2013, refused to say where the remainder was.
In Lee’s case, police said about A$1 million had been recovered.