Ms. Tang, a resident in southern China's Guangzhou Province, is accusing the China Construction Bank of bad management, and has brought them to court, after been swindled out of a substantial sum of money at an ATM machine.

When Ms. Tang was withdrawing money with her card from an ATM machine on May 7, 2006, a man standing behind tapped on her shoulder and asked if she had dropped something on the ground. She naturally looked downwards, but didn't find anything. Then she took her card and cash, and left, Guangzhou-based New Express reports.

Quite to her surprise, she found that 34,300 yuan from her card account was gone two days later when she returned to the bank.

A video clip from the ATMs camera shows that the man standing behind her inserted a fake card half into the machine when Ms. Tang was distracted. Thus, she actually took away the fake card and left the original inside when she left.

The thief then changed the card's password and transferred all the money out.

Ms. Tang believes the bank should be responsible for the accident for three reasons: having not set up any identity verification procedure for changing passwords; no warning signs displayed despite a high incidence of such crimes in the area and the easiness of counterfeiting such cards

However, the bank insists that the loss by Ms. Tang is the direct result of the criminal's deeds and her own carelessness. It claims there is no deficit in the running of its ATM.

"After a client enters their password and before he or she quits the interface, the bank can only deem that the operator is the same person."

A local court is now hearing the case.

(CRIENGLISH.com July 19, 2007)