Woman charged with blowing AU$4.6m overdraft on 'a lot of handbags' A 21-year-old woman has appeared in court in Sydney accused of taking advantage of a Westpac Bank glitch which saw her accidentally granted an unlimited overdraft against which she allegedly withdrew AU$4.6m, "part of which she spent on luxury handbags", as news.com.au puts it. Chemical engineering student Christine Jiaxin Lee …
"dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception and knowingly dealing with the proceeds of crime"
WTF? They have THAT on their statute? ..and even if they do, how can any of it possibly apply?
Who do they allege she deceived? The bank gave her the money.
Proceeds of WHAT CRIME? The imaginary deception which NEVER OCCURRED?
"failed to notify the bank that she was not entitled to the money"
Oh! That's her "crime"? Like when those corporations lower their prices, interest rates, or whatever to steal eachother's customers but fail to notify their established victims that they are no longer entitled to the money then?
Or just give our money away for the hell of it. Oh look, you've noticed we've been handing your money out to all and sundry without bothering to check for your authorisation? Well you've been identity thefted then. Tough shit sucker.
Talk about one "law" for them and another for us. The bank seems to have plod on their pocket. Taken a few years for the bank to find the right palms to grease though - by the sound of things. She should sue. Slander, defamation, wrongful arrest and malicious prosecution.
...then dig up the patio and go and live somewhere less corrupt.
If someone gives you something by mistake, and that mistake it quite obvious to any sane person, then you don't get to pocket it, and run away crying "Too late, your mistake! It's mine now!" That's not how the law works.
This woman had no reasonable, sane, expectation of a AU$4.6m overdraft. Taking it and ignoring attempts to contact her is theft. Classic "Not thinking the thing through" and "If I ignore the situation it'll go away" behaviour.
You can criticize the bank for its mistake, and the length of time taken to pursue the matter. But you don't get to steal from someone just because they are careless and incompetent.
This woman had no reasonable, sane, expectation of a AU$4.6m overdraft.
That's the fun part, I think - it wasn't an overdraft. She remained in credit throughout :).
As for sane expectations, cool, so she could plead temporary insanity? If she were a professional banker she would indeed get away with squandering other people's money without consequences - after all, we've seen that during the Wall Street originated global crash.
You can criticize the bank for its mistake, and the length of time taken to pursue the matter. But you don't get to steal from someone just because they are careless and incompetent.
Once upon a time, if the bank blew it and gave you too much money, as in this case, it was yours unless you were kind-hearted and decided to return it. The onus was on the bank to take due care and this more or less helped enforce it. Things have turned around a bit.. now it's your fault if the bank screws up in your favor. Come to think of it, it's your fault whether it's in their favor or yours. My, how times have changed....
Well no. When they cock up and the client steals lots of money, it's the client's fault.
Sure, it's fun to laugh at the banks. And also, they've fucked up big time. So they're also to blame, for incompetence and putting massive temptation in someone's way. But you can't claim that the money is magically yours, just because the bank have messed up. And if her account is showing an overdraft, then she should also know it's a loan. Taking out a loan you have no intention or ability to pay back is basically fraud - at least if you plan it that way. But that intent is hard to prove, the bank are also responsible for checking your ability to pay an unsecured debt, and there was no intent to begin with here, as it was the bank's cock-up, presumably discovered accidentally.
HP once paid my company an £120,000 invoice twice. It took me most of a month to persuade their payments department that they'd made a mistake, and did they want their money back. Had I not bothered, and knowingly kept the cash, that would have been theft.
You are right except the lady did not take the money. The bank extended a loan to her and she accepted. It is not a gift. Also, the bank did not incorrectly deposit $4M to her account which she the used. The bank extended a credit facility to her and she accepted.
We can question her judgment for accessing so much of the fund and what she used it for. We can also consider whether or not she expected she would be able to repay it. But your argument that what se did was theft because she used money given to her which she was not entitled to is off base.
I don't buy that argument. The definition of theft in the UK is to take property belonging to somebody else with the intention to permanently deprive them of it.
Taking a bit more overdraft than you're allowed, not believing your luck and getting an extra few nights out is not theft. The bank screwed up, tough titty.
Taking millions of dollars of money that's not yours, systematically over a long period of time, because someone else has obviously screwed up, knowing that you'll never be able to pay it back is another matter entirely.
There's a point at which any reasonable adult has got to say to themselves, there will be consequences. Sure, the bank offered her a loan. But we're all adults, and we know what loan means. Loan means: Repayment. With interest.
If she successfully argues that she can't count. Or was too stupid to be able to manage her money, or too stupid to realise that it wasn't her cash allowing her to literally spend millions - then fair do. I just spent the cash until the card was declined, that's how I manage my finances - could be a valid defence. Execpt when you start taking out thousands of pounds in cash, or buying Gucci handbags. Then you surely know what you're doing.
My cash card only allows me to take out £500 a day. So to get a million in cash out of my bank, I'd have to daily go to the cash machine, and take out the full whack, for 200 days! That would be, by any reasonable definition, a calculated act.
The bank fucked up. No sympathy. They put huge temptation in her way. But she took it. At some point, giving in to that temptation was a choice.
If I find £1,000 in cash somewhere, that money isn't mine. Keeping a fiver you find is fair enough, it's impossible to trace. Good luck to you. If you find £1,000 though, someone's going to seriously miss that.
Doh! Sorry. Basic counting error.
There's a higher limit for withdrawals from branch, although in that case you might have to fill out a form (to get larger amounts), and you'd have thought they might notice. There's also cashback on debit card transactions (if they do that in Oz), and of course they may have higher ATM limits. I'm sure I could get mine raised, but have never needed to.
The point being that it takes conscious effort to get large amounts of cash out of a bank account. Which requires thought, which implies planning, and at some point that planning may become criminal. What you need to determine "mens rea" - i.e. Did you know your actions were wrong.
"<snip> make withdrawals "on numerous occasions that totalled $4,653,333.02" between July 2014 and April 2015."
"Although fraud cops began an investigation into the matter in 2012, it wasn't until March this year that an arrest warrant was issued"
So, the cops knew that she had access to this money two years before she did? I'm confused.
Where can I get one of these time machines? I would happily sell my house just to rent one for long enough to go back in time and put £1000 on Leicester to win the premier league. Its a shame that the bookies won't make a mistake like that again. I'll even bet a fiver that Christine Jiaxin Lee would like to use some of her overdraft to do the same, just so that she can pay off her overdraft.
So she spent a lot of money on designer handbags... that's fine.
When she thought she was going to get cuffed she tried to skip town... OK.
But how was she planning to get her loot out of the country if the airline only allows one piece of hand baggage...?
Mark 85,
Making a mistake is not a crime. And remember that the banks weren't checking carefully, but also the mortgage applications require you to say you can pay the money back. So you have to lie in order to get the money. Also, in a housing market with prices rising at silly rates like 10% a year, it's not that big an issue. If you can't pay after 5 years, you just sell, and everyone gets their money back - with you making some profit.
My brother quit as a mortgage underwriter in 2006 because he was sick of arguing with his bosses about whether to put through applications that were, in his opinion, dodgy. But even if you could prove that company did commit fraud, it wouldn't be on the people they lent to. It would be because they were then packaging up the mortgage debts and selling them on as CDOs - if you could prove that they were lending in cases where they believed the mortgages were riskier than they actually were.
Anyway the subprime mortgage crisis is not really a tale of fraud, but of market failure. There were two problems. The theory of CDOs was that you often packaged good mortgage debt with bad, in order to make the bad more sellable. Then even in a crash the good would still keep paying, and the repossessions would cover most of the loss of the bad. You sold the debt at a discount, so it was theoretically exremely low risk. Hence the AAA ratings. Unfortunately, this turned out to be bollocks.
The theory was actually correct though. Most of the UK packaged mortgage debts (CDOs) are still paying back at better than the worse predicted failure rate. So they weren't fraudulent, the calcs were correct and a lot of it was actually worthy of its AAA rating. There was some high risk paper, that was trading at bigger discounts, so you'd make more profit it it went right, but that wasn't AAA and so nobody could complain if it went wrong.
The second problem was that the market failed. Everyone panicked. Nobody trusted anybody else anymore. The banks wouldn't lend to each other, as they were scared the other banks were holding loads of worthless paper, and might go bust at any time. Which of course meant nobody would admit to what they were holding, which reinforced the crisis. Since nobody properly understood these CDOs, nobody was able to value them, so they became unsellable. Even though it's turned out that most of them were in fact correctly valued. So if you had a load, and needed cash, you had to sell at 50% of book value (to companies that have made a very nice profit since) - but that meant you were burning through twice the amount of reserves you needed to for a given amount of cash, which meant you didn't have enough reserves. That's why the banks needed bailing out. Most of them were in fact perfectly fine, but a crisis of markets and confidence made their survival impossible - hence we needed Central Banks to save the day. Which is why most of them have paid back all those loans. Hence the oft-quoted line about giving the banks money is bollocks, we lent them money because they were solvent (but illiquid) - which is the job of a Central Bank. Some we re-capitalised, and took shares in compensation.
Anyway the subprime mortgage crisis is not really a tale of fraud, but of market failure
Absolutely not. The subprime mortgage crisis is a classic example of what happens when regulators as well as rating agencies don't do their job at all and let banks sell something that would not have stood up to even the most cursory examination - which is why everyone was actively looing the other way.
Yes, people have to make a promise of repayment, but if you start rewarding people for mortgages without ANY check on the feasibility of such a repayment you are willingly creating a mirage of value where none exists, and we all know what the end result was.
You might want to read The Big Short or watch the film made of it, which is actually quite an interesting way to make the key concepts understandable for everyone). Not that this mattered much, Wall Street has by all indications already resumed causing trouble - now they have found a way to divert the attention (why do you think those tax haven reports keep showing up?) I'm sure it won't be long before we get hit again.
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