Source: CCTV.com

02-23-2008 13:44

A court in the southern city of Guangzhou has finished re-hearing the case of a migrant worker who took more than 170-thousand Yuan from a malfunctioning ATM. Defendant Xu Ting was sentenced to life imprisonment in November. The court said a fresh verdict will be made in the coming days.

The Intermediate People's Court of Guangzhou was told by a higher court last month to rehear the case of Xu Ting, saying that its ruling in November lacked evidence and some facts needed clarification.

During court hearing, questions were raised about whether taking money from an ATM is the same as robbing a financial institution, and whether it constitutes theft if money is handed over willingly.

In April 2006, 24-year-old Xu Ting from Shanxi Province found that an ATM of Guangzhou Commercial Bank deducted only one yuan from his account for every 1000 yuan withdrawn.

Wu Yichun, Xu Ting's lawyer, said, "According to Xu Ting's confession, there was more than 170 yuan in his bank account. He had wanted to take out a hundred yuan, but he wrongly input the number of one thousand, after he pressed the confirm button, one thousand yuan just came out from the machine."

When Xu put his card back again in the ATM, he found there's only one yuan less in his account.

Wu Yichun said, "He tried again, another one thousand yuan came out of the ATM. Then he did it again and again, and took away over fifty thousand yuan."

Xu subsequently withdrew 175-thousand yuan or about 24-thousand US dollars in over 170 transactions.

Xu remained on the run until he was caught in May last year. In the first trial, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for theft from financial institutions.

The sentence sparked a public outcry. Many said Xu did not deserve such severe sentence.

Zhong Wei, prof. of Financial Research Center, BJ Normal Univ., said, "The reason why a bank deposition card could take out such a lot of money is because there's a major mistake in the banking system. From this case, we can see that the ATM's problem was there for a long time without being corrected. In addition, the bank has got compensation from the company that runs the ATM three days after Xu's taking of the money."

Experts say some commercial banks conduct machine maintenance once every two days, which means mistakes can't be corrected in a short time. As more people choose to use ATMs, the machine maintenance work becomes increasingly important.

 

Editor:Liu Fang