Ms. Tang, a resident in southern China's Guangzhou Province, is accusing the China
Construction Bank of bad management, and has brought them to court,
after been swindled out of a substantial sum of money at an ATM
machine.
When Ms. Tang was withdrawing money with her card from an ATM
machine on May 7, 2006, a man standing behind tapped on her
shoulder and asked if she had dropped something on the ground. She
naturally looked downwards, but didn't find anything. Then she took
her card and cash, and left, Guangzhou-based New Express
reports.
Quite to her surprise, she found that 34,300 yuan from her card
account was gone two days later when she returned to the bank.
A video clip from the ATMs camera shows that the man standing
behind her inserted a fake card half into the machine when Ms. Tang
was distracted. Thus, she actually took away the fake card and left
the original inside when she left.
The thief then changed the card's password and transferred all
the money out.
Ms. Tang believes the bank should be responsible for the
accident for three reasons: having not set up any identity
verification procedure for changing passwords; no warning signs
displayed despite a high incidence of such crimes in the area and
the easiness of counterfeiting such cards
However, the bank insists that the loss by Ms. Tang is the
direct result of the criminal's deeds and her own carelessness. It
claims there is no deficit in the running of its ATM.
"After a client enters their password and before he or she quits
the interface, the bank can only deem that the operator is the same
person."
A local court is now hearing the case.
(CRIENGLISH.com July 19, 2007)