Fraudsters jailed after claiming to be handling deal for Jiang Zemin's sister in US$10 trillion HSBC swindle
Mainlander and two Taiwan-born tricksters used fake documents in audacious bank deception.
A mainlander and two Taiwan-born fraudsters were jailed on Thursday after they claimed in March to be handling a deal for former president Jiang Zemin's sister in an attempt to swindle a bank out of US$10 trillion with fake documents.
Zhong Dihang, 35, Jimmy Wu Ping-yang, 63, and Hwa Sih-hul, 60, will serve jail terms of two years and four months, two years and six months and three years and two months, respectively. Two others are still at large.
The five visited HSBC headquarters in Central on March 26 and asked two staff members to help present the counterfeit documents to the bank's group chief executive, Stuart Gulliver, the District Court heard earlier.
They boasted that the two deposit forms and two deposit confirmation slips were meant for a meeting at HSBC with officials from the UN, International Monetary Fund, Hong Kong Monetary Authority and Hong Kong government the following day, and asked the bank to verify the validity of the documents.
Questioned by staff, the group asserted they were handling a transaction for Jiang's sister, the court heard. "The defendants must have discussed and mapped out their plan before committing the offences," Judge Douglas Yau Tak-hong said yesterday, describing their plan as bold.
Yau praised HSBC employees for being so conscientious about their work that their employer did not sustain any losses.