A developer manages to steal a negligible amount of $ XNUMX million from an ATM after finding and exploiting a ridiculous hole in the ATM program.
Sounds like something out of a movie. A disgruntled bank planner discovers the perfect plan to make an ATM withdraw money without charging it to anyone.
But this story is true. The South China Morning Post and Daily Economic News of China report that Qin Qisheng, 43, managed to withdraw over 7 million yuan (over $1 million USA) from an ATM operated by his employer bank, Huaxia Bank, exploiting a loophole.
According to reports, the bank's system does not properly record withdrawals made around midnight, resulting in cash being deducted from the user's account. Normally, this could raise a red flag in the system, that a transaction has failed, but Qisheng allegedly introduced a script into the program and silenced these alerts.
Qisheng started making money from November 2016 to January 2018, and after about 1.358 withdrawals the bank discovered the bad guy code into her system and alerted the authorities to arrest him.
The sequel is perhaps the most amazing part of this story. Qisheng returned the money and the bank no longer wanted to pursue him. He may have feared bad publicity (apparently the window is already closed), so Huaxia Bank asked the police to drop the case, accepting Qisheng's excuse that he was just testing the bank's security and holding the money to ask for it. bank !!!.
However, the court he refused and Qisheng faces 10,5 years in prison. They were not convinced by the argument, believing that the accused had transferred the money to his personal bank account, and not to a fake bank account, because he was investing the money in the stock market.
it's not the first time which ATMs are made target of smart developers. However, today's story is particularly delicate with Msblueusing perpetrator and victim perspectives.
