Chinese bank scandal customers struggle to register for scheme to pay back money
- While some customers successfully registered and received their money, others were faced with a string of problems when trying to sign up for the overloaded system
- The local authorities unveiled the scheme to repay those who had deposited the equivalent of US$7,400 in four banks in Henan earlier this week
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However, many said they had succeeded in registering and the first payments had started arriving.
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State broadcaster CCTV reported on Thursday night that the funds come from some of the seized and frozen assets of the New Wealth Group, a company that police say is at the centre of the current scandal, having allegedly been used by a criminal suspect to effectively control several rural banks.
One customer, a woman surnamed Sun, said she started trying to register for the repayments on Friday morning.
The previous day, she had followed government protocol and registered her information on an official website and received a message of confirmation.
But on Friday when she tried registering with a WeChat app designated by the Henan government, she received an error message.
“They kept saying if you qualify, you can follow the procedure, but I do qualify and still couldn’t log in,” she said. “I felt confused.”
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Sun has 50,000 yuan (US$7,400) in the Shangcai Huimin County Bank, one of the four banks affected, and more than 200,000 yuan in some other rural banks.
Another woman, named Zhang, who deposited 50,000 yuan in the Yuzhou Xinminsheng Village Bank, received a text message from the Henan Rural Credit Union on Thursday night, reminding her that the advance would be processed from 9am Friday morning.
She started to register with the WeChat app on Friday, but as she was uploading her photo ID for verification, she received a message saying “due to the large number of visitors to the system, the uploading of pictures is slow, please try again later”.
When she tried again, she got the message saying “due to network congestion, the system is being optimised, please be patient”.
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Eventually her efforts paid off and she was able to register at lunchtime and received her money later that afternoon.
“I’m relieved to see that the money is actually on my card, but I don’t know if I’ll get the interest I’m entitled to back, after all, the whole process of recovering money that belongs to me is too tiring and complicated,” she said.
In one WeChat group used by hundreds of bank customers only a couple of applicants said they had registered successfully.
One of them, a man named Ren from Heilongjiang province, said it had taken multiple efforts before he was finally able to register. To do so he had to verify by phone, upload his photo ID and pass a facial recognition test, before he could proceed.
He had deposited 49,999 yuan in the Yuzhou Xinminsheng Village Bank, and received a message saying it would be transferred to another account within 24 hours.
But he said he has deposited money in many other banks across China and was worried that others would suffer the same problems as the ones in Henan.
“This will have a huge effect on medium and small banks in China,” he said.
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Customers who have deposited more than 50,000 yuan in the banks are still pushing to get their money back, but have so far received no guarantees they will be repaid.
“I want to trust our government,” one woman said. “You can’t just give back the 50,000 yuan, but not give back my 1.11 million yuan, right?”
