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Facebook Update Exposes Couple's Bank Fraud Romp

by Lee Bains on May 26, 2009 at 10:12 AM



When a New Zealand couple applied to borrow $NZ10,000 (about $6,000) for the gas station they owned, they could not have possibly foreseen the windfall a simple computing error would bring them. And New Zealand's WestPac bank could not have possibly foreseen Facebook's role in the investigation of the $NZ10 million fraud.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, when New Zealanders Leo Gao and Kara Yang-Hurring recently found more than $6 million deposited into their bank account (due to a WestPac employee's accidental inclusion of a few extra zeroes), the couple wasted no time in fleeing with their bounty. New Zealand authorities have been tracking Gao and Yang-Hurring since, and were undoubtedly glad to encounter a bone-headed move by one of the couple's several hangers on.



Yang-Hurring's sister Aroha Hurring has been detailing the group's fraudulent East Asian escapades on her Facebook account. The Morning Herald writes that her Facebook status was,"Aroha Hurring is having a Tsingtao beer. It's 30 degrees plus - the heat is good though." Hurring's various updates have traced the group's progress through various parts of Macau and China. According to a report yesterday from New Zealand's Facebook-savvy authorities, one member of the group was scheduled to return to New Zealand yesterday, and was slated for interrogation.

We have to admit that finding an inexplicable fortune in our bank accounts would set our hearts aflutter, but we're also pretty dang sure that we'd report the error. And we know for certain that, if we were to take the dishonest route, we wouldn't post about it on Facebook. A lack of common decency and a lack of common sense seem to go together like horse and buggy. [From: Sydney Morning Herald]

Tags: banks, crime, facebook, facebook face loss, FacebookFaceLoss, fraud, new zealand, NewZealand, top

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