Shanghai, China

Last week, authorities in Yueqing, a Chinese city some 370 km south of Shanghai shared a somewhat bizarre but what most internet users in the country found an amusing case. The story of a woman named Chen Yile who disappeared while working as a 26-year-old bank teller back in 1997 and was found after over two decades of allegedly stealing 3.98 million yuan (US$587,000 today). Reportedly, after she stole more than half a million dollars, she got a plastic surgery done and moved to another province to start a new life. 

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According to a report by Bloomberg, Chen was working as a bank teller at China Construction Bank Corp when over a weekend back in 1997 she stole at least US$600,000 by inflating bank accounts and withdrawing the amount from different ATMs. Subsequently, Chen spent “tens of thousands” of yuan on plastic surgery and procured a new ID in the nearby city of Wenzhou said the report. 

Eventually, she went off the grid and cut all contact with her former husband as well as her family members and settled in Guangdong under the name Jiang Mouhong from Shanghai, as per the ID she bought. After moving to Guangdong, she remarried, had a daughter and also started her own business of cleaning supplies. 

The Chinese authorities also said that Chen’s father had reported the crime back in 1997 as she could not carry the entire amount she stole and hid it at home and transferred some amount to relatives’ bank accounts. The sum of money she had stolen was huge then. In her statement, Chen said that she “quickly spent” the money she stole but is willing to return what she took and “make up for the losses”. 

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While the authorities did not reveal the details of her arrest which took place last week they said that they tracked her down in December and Chen has now been charged with corruption, forgery of documents and bigamy, as per the Bloomberg report. In a WeChat post, prosecutors in Yueqing also reportedly said she confessed to all her crimes and expressed remorse.

Chen also spoke reportedly about how she missed her family while being on the run for 25 years and named her company after a Chinese poem about missing relatives far away every festive day. Sharing the stranger-than-fiction story, the Yueqing People’s Procuratorate said that for over two decades the investigators "never gave up on arresting Chen". Meanwhile, one user on the Chinese social media platform Weibo said, "Putting aside the criminal element, this is the script for how a female protagonist changed her life", as per Vice. 

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