China is known for its knock-offs: from clothes and toys to DVDs and counterfeit banknotes. Now a fake branch of China Construction Bank in Shandong province has joined the ranks of a “flagship” Apple store and a home-made branch of Ikea.
One of the world’s largest banks became the latest victim of an elaborate fake after a local man set up a branch of its bank complete with card readers, passbooks and three teenage girls at the teller counter.
The convincing-looking “ghost bank” near the city of Linyi joins some of China’s more impressive scams. These include the fake army officers who wander the nation collecting bribes, the soft drink vendor who faked his own death to get compensation from the local city government and the Chinese rice trader who claimed to buy an American bank that did not, in fact, exist.
The fake bank lasted a month before a local woman who had deposited Rmb40,000 ($6,200) discovered she was unable to make withdrawals at a real branch of China Construction Bank. Managers there detected the “fake” deposit and alerted police.
Officers discovered a man, surnamed Zhang, had set up the bank and staffed it with his 15-year-old daughter and two of her classmates, according to Lanling County police spokesman Mr Song.
“If someone came requesting to withdraw the money, they would say that their network hadn’t been established yet, or that the authority hadn’t finished approval procedures,” Mr Song said. “They wouldn’t allow people to withdraw money.”
Mr Zhang told a reporter from Shandong Television he had formally applied to join a commercial bank network but had not been approved. “I just wanted to open a bank,” he said in a television interview from behind bars. “I didn’t think that much about it.”
A China Construction Bank media relations official said the bank had an “application process that’s fairly complex” for new branches. She said she was not aware of previous cases of unauthorised branches.
Mr Zhang is not the first person to do this. A rural co-operative near the city of Nanjing last year upgraded itself into a bank and attracted $32m in deposits by promising interest rates as high as 2 per cent a week. A businessman reported it in January after the “bank” would not allow him to withdraw his savings.
Mr Zhang told the TV station he had returned his depositors’ money.
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