A Chinese woman who lived under a fake identity for 25 years after stealing more than half a million dollars from a bank and having plastic surgery to change her appearance has been caught.
(Bloomberg) — A Chinese woman who lived under a fake identity for 25 years after stealing more than half a million dollars from a bank and having plastic surgery to change her appearance has been caught.
Authorities in Yueqing, a city some 370 km (230 miles) south of Shanghai, revealed the details of the real-life film noir in a social media post this week, much to the amusement of internet users in the Asian nation.
Authorities said Chen Yile disappeared in 1997 while working as a 26-year-old bank teller at China Construction Bank Corp. She apparently stole some 3.98 million yuan ($587,000 now) by inflating bank accounts over a weekend, then withdrawing cash from ATMs.
She paid “tens of thousands” of yuan for plastic surgery in nearby Wenzhou, then bought a new ID card bearing the name Jiang Mouhong in Shanghai. Chen broke off contact with her former husband and settled in Guangdong, where she remarried, had a daughter and started a cleaning supplies business.
Authorities said they tracked her down in December and charged her with crimes including corruption, forgery of documents and bigamy. Police didn’t say how they found Chen, but did say her father reported the crime back in 1997. Chen was only able to physically carry some 400,000 yuan as she fled, and put the rest in a home and in relatives’ bank accounts.
“The 400,000 or so yuan of stolen money I took at the time was quickly spent, but I made money from starting my company,” the statement quoted Chen as saying. “I am willing to return what I stole and make up for the losses.”
Chen said she missed her family during her 25 years on the run. She named her company after a Chinese poem that reads: “Every festive day, we think more than ever of our relatives far away.”
–With assistance from Selina Xu.
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