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With no text or phone call reminder, 22 clients’ deposits totaling 150 million yuan at a bank was suddenly gone, and the clients were told that the deposit slips they held were fake.

From May to November of this year, five people from Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province were told that their deposit slips were fake when they tried to make withdrawals at a bank in Shandong Province. There was no record of making the initial deposit, either. The deposits of these five Shaoxing clients were 8 million yuan, 6.7 million yuan, 2.26 million yuan, 5 million yuan and 1.27 million yuan, respectively. Besides these five clients in Shaoxing, there are 17 other people from different places in Zhejiang who also lost their deposits in the bank in Shandong.

Why would these people put money in a non-local bank? It is known as “extra-interest deposit”—besides regular interest from the bank, there is extra interest from lending companies with high interest rates. As a matter of fact, “extra-interest deposit” had been officially forbidden by the China Banking Regulatory Commission, the Ministry of Finance of China, as well as People’s Bank of China, yet there are still bank clients, banks, and companies secretly doing the business. The greater the amount of the deposit, the higher the interest rate. In this case, the interest of the bank in Shandong was much higher than the one in Zhejiang, which is why these five people got taken in by the scam.

This case is currently under investigation by the Shandong police department. Two bank employees have been arrested for forging financial bills.