An ATM that distributes free money is everyone's dream. A dream that for an employee of the Chinese bank Huaxia Bank has turned into reality enriching it (but only temporarily) of 7 million Yuan, corresponding to just over 900 thousand euros.
The news is spread by the Chinese newspapers South China Morning Post and China Daily Economic News: the forty-three Qin Qisheng, programmer for Huaxia Bank, has noticed and exploited a flaw in the computer systems of the bank to withdraw free cash.
The programmer found that the withdrawals made around midnight were not correctly recorded, leading to a disbursement of money without being charged to the client's account. When this happens, the system should normally send a non-compliant transaction report, but the programmer has inserted a script into the system in order to suppress these alerts.
Qisheng then began to withdraw money in November 2016 and only in January 2018, after he carried out something like 1358 withdrawals, the bank identified the malicious code in the system and reported the programmer to the authorities.
Apparently the flaw was resolved, but after Qisheng returned the loot the bank would have asked the authorities not to proceed with the case. The programmer stated that it was a "simple" test of the bank's security systems and that he was keeping the money for the return.
The court has decided to continue the normal legal course of things, and Qisheng is now faced with a sentence of 10 years and a half sentence of imprisonment after losing the appeal. His explanations did not convince the judges, who found in fact that the money was set aside on his personal account and not on a bank account and that some of them were used to make investments on the stock market.