50-Minute Video, Worth Every Second! The CCP's Only Weakness, Just Four Words! Qi Qi Ba Ba TALK Episode 1009 20261024

This episode shares an investigative report from Sanlian Lifeweek regarding Wang Qunshan, a wealth management manager at the Postal Savings Bank of China in Shangqiu, Henan, who is suspected of embezzling over 10 million yuan of depositors' funds. Through the reporter's account, we explore the management loopholes existing in grassroots bank branches, the regulatory disconnect between self-operated and agency models, and the plight of multiple elderly depositors and merchants who, due to blind trust, found their retirement savings defrauded.

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Hello everyone, welcome to Qiqi Baba, I am Qiqi. Actually, after I finished reading about this case, I had wanted to share it with you all for a long time. But it is indeed a bit too long. I had been wondering if friends would actually follow along and watch such a long video. But I truly feel it is worth it, so let's take a look at it together, come on.

In April 2025, Wang Qunshan, a wealth management manager at a Postal Savings Bank branch in Shangqiu City, Henan Province, was found to have committed suicide by hanging at home. Afterward, multiple depositors at the bank discovered that the money in their bank accounts had mysteriously vanished. It turned out that starting in 2016, Wang Qunshan had been successively transferring these funds into personal accounts belonging to herself and her relatives for other uses, with the total amount involved reaching over 10 million yuan.

Hello everyone, welcome to the scene. "On the Scene" is a podcast hosted by reporters from Sanlian Lifeweek that focuses on social news events. Today, we have invited Chen Yingxia, a reporter who participated in the investigation of this case, to chat with us about this economic crime. Yingxia, we know this case actually came to light because the wealth management manager Wang Qunshan was found to have committed suicide at home, right? How was her suicide discovered at the time? And what was the reaction of the depositors when they heard the news of her suicide?

Wang Qunshan died by suicide on the morning of April 12th, and the depositors basically didn't find out until around April 16th when they went to the bank to withdraw money, so the manager's suicide came first, and their discovery of the incident came later. Basically, for many of these people, their money wasn't just deposited there; many had this wealth manager help them purchase wealth management products. They thought the bank manager was helping them operate these investments, but in the end, there were no investments, and the money was gone too. So they connected this with Wang Qunshan. Moreover, Wang Qunshan herself had been flagged when people from the bank, her superiors, came to their grassroots branch to audit their transaction records and discovered that there were indeed problems. Later, she committed suicide the morning after her leaders went to her home to talk to her. After this incident, after she committed suicide, her husband Meng Wei—this is his real name—was also listed as an accomplice and was placed under investigation by the police. Four months later, in August, her husband also committed suicide.

Oh, so they both essentially committed suicide out of fear of punishment? How was Wang Qunshan able to gain access to their accounts at the time?

Some people were a bit clearer about it. Among those I interviewed, there was an elderly person who went to check the surveillance footage from the last few months after the fact. In one of the clips, the scene where his last transaction of 50,000 yuan disappeared was actually captured at that time.

That is, the financial manager Wang Qunshan took this elderly person to the ATM machine outside the entrance of their Postal Savings Bank. When the two of them reached the machine, they exchanged a few brief words. Then Wang Qunshan immediately started tapping and pressing buttons on it. After pressing them, he asked the elderly person about 50,000 yuan, and the elderly person said yes, 50,000. After that, he performed some operations, ejected the card, and the two of them left, returning to the financial manager's office. Once back in the office, they continued chatting about the financial investment.

For every single investment he made, the principal, interest, and interest rate were all written down for him in his notebook, and plus 50,000 was recorded for him in his notebook like that. This process made it possible to see how he operated.

So from their perspective, why did they trust Wang Qunshan so much that he could do these operations for them? Because we know that in banks, when doing these kinds of input-type operations or even facial recognition operations, everyone tends to be quite cautious. Why could I entrust an ordinary employee at the bank to do these things?

Things. On the one hand, it is indeed his identity as a financial manager; he handles financial investments, and this is his primary job. On the other hand, he is indeed a formal bank, and the financial products he bought were, from the perspective of these elderly people, regular financial products inside the bank. Moreover, it wasn't just this one time he bought things for them before; many times in the past, the financial products he bought for them were formal products from within the bank. These are two points. Furthermore, when he operated on behalf of this elderly person, he only did some preliminary operations, such as entering passwords. Most of the time, the elderly person entered them themselves, except that for the initial steps like transferring money and pressing those buttons to buy the investment, the elderly person had no idea how to do it, so they needed the financial manager to operate it for them.

Definitely after this incident happened, the elderly person might have realized that Wang Qunshan was not as simple as they imagined! He wasn't just a simple employee kindly helping us through the operation process.

Mm.

Before that, in their eyes, what kind of person was Wang Qunshan?

In the eyes of these depositors, Wang Qunshan was an exceptionally good person. Even when we went to investigate, although the person had already passed away and the proportion of money that can now be recovered is very low, they would still say that Wang Qunshan was very good. They would feel whether Wang Qunshan himself still had some grievances or faced some kind of pressure, which is why he committed suicide? Not everyone was willing to believe that he operated it himself. Wang Qunshan was 36 years old, and he had been working at this Postal Savings Bank in Shangqiu, Henan.

For more than a decade, his contact time with many of these elderly people has lasted as long as ten years in some cases. In addition, in daily life, this Wang Chunshan was actually very good to these elderly people. On the one hand, in terms of business, whenever these elderly people came to their bank, Wang Chunshan would basically go out to greet them every time. For example, this elderly person said that when they went to other banks to deposit money before, no one would pay attention to them.

Um.

Just like the elderly person themselves, for example, not knowing how to operate certain machines and having no one to take care of them like that. But Wang Qunshan was not only very enthusiastic in his greetings, he basically addressed them verbally as uncles and aunts, calling them with special warmth. When they needed to wait in line here, they would invite them to sit in his VIP room and give them.

Uh.

A cup of tea, then a bottle of water, and afterwards when they went to the counter to handle business, he was always right by their side. If there was any character you didn't know how to write, I would teach you to write it; then if there was any operation you didn't know how to do, I would tell you how to do it. At the same time, he used some of his authority—if they hadn't applied for a VIP card, he could also use his authority to let them go to the counter with priority so they didn't have to wait in line. In fact, he provided a lot of convenience at work. Then outside of work, for example, every time these elderly people finished their business, he would always bring some bank gifts to send to them, and they.

Many elderly people rode tricycle carts, and he would always deliver the gifts directly to the elderly person.

On the tricycle cart.

Hey, because their branches often have rotations, when rotated to other branches, it might be a bit far from the elderly person's home. One time it was as far as seven kilometers, and Wang Qunshan would drive to pick up and drop off this elderly person every quarter to come to their branch to handle business.

So.

It was exceptionally good in every aspect. Then on extra occasions, like when the elderly people had birthdays or during other holidays, he would bring some gifts to visit them, including buying a cake for the elderly person's birthday to wish them a happy holiday. Then some depositors were merchants, and when he drove past sometimes, he would often go in for a while to chat with them. Then sometimes he brought gifts, and if there were no gifts, he would support everyone's business by buying a few hundred yuan worth of goods. As we know, there are usually tellers in banks, and then helpers.

Including management layers at all levels, haha, and there would be some people we might not see when entering the lobby. Regarding this, what kind of role did Wang Qunshan play in this entire Postal Savings Bank branch?

Mm. Based on what I learned from interviewing some people inside banks, actually financial managers and tellers are at the same rank, they are just responsible for different businesses. Tellers are similar to being responsible for deposit businesses.

Mm.

And then this financial manager is responsible for the intermediate business related to financial management. They just have different business lines, but indeed, mm, looking at it inside their bank, it feels like he belongs to the middle management kind of feeling. That's because when these elderly people go to their bank, he would say in the hall, maybe for example, if this elderly person needs to do some business, he would casually call some staff member to help him out. And then I took a look at the staff chart inside their bank at that time, right at the very top was the branch manager of this sub-branch, and next came the financial manager.

Ah, and then below that would be tellers, you can see it's a three-tier structure like that. And also, another point is why he might have such authority? One is because this financial manager is indeed able to make a lot of money for the bank, because they are a grassroots Postal Savings grassroots outlet, which doesn't have loan business, they can't handle loan business, so there are only deposits and financial management business. Deposit business actually isn't.

Not profitable.

Then the only thing that can make money is this.

Financial management business. Because as you just mentioned, he has actually been working for more than ten years, has he been staying at this same outlet all along, or is he actually being transferred back and forth between different sub-branches or different head offices?

They follow the requirement that every year or two, two or three years, they have to be transferred from one outlet to another. From what I understand so far, he has probably changed six or seven outlets in these ten years or so.

It's just that.

They are all within Postal Savings.

Underneath.

What?

But these depositors have always been following him, staying, for example, if he goes to a new outlet, we go to this outlet to find him, is that how it is? Yes, yes, yes, this is what makes him so capable.

Like other professions, why do they say these financial managers and employees need to rotate? It's to prevent him from having long-term ties with these people and some risks happening, so they make them rotate. But once rotated, it's like your original customers are lost, and the financial manager certainly wouldn't want that. So this person relies on some private connections and also provides some conveniences, for example, driving to pick you up, because that elderly person didn't want to go, so he drove to pick them up and drop them off.

Being able to retain these customers, so these elderly people basically stay with him long-term, meaning the stickiness is very high.

Ah, because you just mentioned that most of these depositors are elderly people, actually we know that the business elderly people can handle themselves is actually not very much, huh, most of it is just us constantly going to look at the money in our passbooks, collecting pensions, doing online banking, just these businesses right. And these businesses actually generally have a rather large difference from financial management. Did these depositors, when they first came to this bank, for example when they came into contact with Wang Qunshan, also start from depositor business?

Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Right, because some of these elderly people are doing business, and some of them are retired employees. Many retired employees got to know Wang Junshan because their pensions were distributed through Postal Savings. Since Wang Junshan was in the hall, roaming around everywhere in the hall, he would often help these elderly people handle some business, and thus became familiar with them. Basically Wang Junshan would follow along beside him to provide guidance or help like that, and later on, he was slowly persuaded by Wang Junshan and all ended up buying financial products.

What kind of rhetoric did he use to persuade the elderly people to take the money out of their depositor accounts to buy financial products?

Because financial products are after all not the kind of financial products we talk about outside, but rather the kind of financial products inside the bank. And he also said he arranged the kind of financial products for the elderly that have particularly low risk. But compared to their simple deposits—simple deposits might only yield two to three points, but his financial products could probably yield about four points, just a little bit higher. So it means being able to have higher returns while being completely principal-protected, so these elderly people were relatively willing.

Mm, then at that time, before this whole incident broke out, huh, how many depositors similar to this did he actually have in his hands? Roughly?

Uh, this was when the police and their bank and others later on would frequently summon these victims to hold meetings. Some elderly people said that at that meeting they could often see around twenty people or so.

Wow, then he is actually very capable. While carrying twenty people with these large amounts of money in their accounts, he is actually constantly maintaining relationships with these people, and moreover, um, should I say he had to maintain a lie? Ah, um, looking from your investigation, huh, Wang Qunshan, it shouldn't be that he wanted to scam money right from the beginning when he had everyone buy financial products, right?

At what point did he discover that?

This here.

There are loopholes that can be exploited. I interviewed ten people and obtained the accounts of about ten individuals. From those, I could see that for about two of them, their money had been siphoned off as early as 2016. The number of people like them in the early stages was very small.

And.

Uh, the amount of funds misappropriated was also very low. There was one elderly person who would basically deposit 10,000 yuan every three or four months, and then on the first or second day after the deposit, this money would be directly siphoned off. This elderly person might be a bit of a special case because he had cataracts, and his wife was illiterate. So, he was a retired senior who got to know Wang Qunshan through collecting his pension. Later, because he suffered from cataracts, he told Wang Qunshan everything, even his passwords and account details, leaving it entirely to him to operate. So, Wang Qunshan also caught some loopholes by chance, and then.

Teacher.

I feel it was tentative, starting to do things like this.

So how did he operate? Of course, if I have the password, um, theoretically I can do anything with that account, right?

Um.

But first, where did he transfer the money to? Did he transfer it all to his own card? Um, in the early days, he really.

It was transferred to his own card.

Always.

Continuing until around 2020 to 2021, it was all transferred directly to his own card.

Wow, that flow is actually very, if there were any supervision, it would actually be very clearly traceable, right? Yes, yes, it is.

It is.

Um, then if I don't have the password, how do I transfer someone else's money into my account? Um, this is a bit like the elderly person mentioned earlier.

Um, um, he.

Tells you, uh, saying that I am handling wealth management for you, and then he goes through a series of operations, and then asks you to enter your password, verification code, and so on.

But this process is actually not buying wealth management products, but transferring money to my account, is that right?

Yes, yes, yes.

Wow, then his operation is actually, oh, much simpler than we imagined. Um, but these elderly people, for example, if I bought any wealth management product.

Um.

Actually, I have a wealth management account, and wealth management products have dividends. In this process, wouldn't they check the money in their own accounts, including the principal and the growth of the dividends?

Uh, these elderly people are quite old, maybe in their seventies or even eighties. They use mobile phones very little, and many of them don't even have mobile banking.

Um.

Yes, yes, some don't even have SMS notification services. They only occasionally go to the bank, for example, to check the money in their accounts. But because the money was used to buy wealth management products, it is quite normal for there to be no balance. Or some people go, for example, when their wealth management product matures, they want to see how much money is in their account, and then you can see that in their account, there would be two of Wang Qunshan's relatives or friends who would transfer two sums of money into the elderly person's account.

Ah, so if you contact them in advance to say you are going to check, Wang Qunshan would transfer money into the account in advance.

Oh, so when they went to check, they didn't find any abnormalities, unless you requested a transaction history, but usually, they wouldn't think of that.

Usually, if I really bought that product, for example, I would think, for example, I invested 100,000 yuan in it.

Um.

And now, uh, Wang Qunshan tells me that it has grown by 5%. So now I roughly know how much money is in there. And next time, he just shows you the number of how much money is in there, and I feel okay, so I write it down in my little notebook. Is that the process?

Um, for these elderly people, as you said, uh, many are retired employees, and some are business people. Actually, chatting with them, although they are seventy or eighty years old, their minds are very clear. And regarding money, uh, how much money they have, these are

Except for Meng Wei, no one else was actually arrested. And even later when we went to interview them, they were all fine. I interviewed her mother-in-law, and her mother-in-law just felt very aggrieved, uh, saying that she had no idea that other people's money was being transferred into her card. She said that card had always been kept in her bag, and Wang Qiushan had never asked her for it. But she did mention one thing: she said her PIN was six zeros.

Ah! He never even changed it.

So she felt that Wang Qishan himself might have used her card to make the transfers, something like that.

But actually, you don't need a PIN to receive a transfer. Anyway, when I want to withdraw the money, I can just ask my relatives or friends for the card under some pretext. Others just said, uh, helping his account was helping with transfers.

Like that.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Their stories vary. It's true that Wang Quanquan did take the initiative to approach them, saying he wanted to borrow their accounts to use.

Uh-huh, and then he.

He said, uh, that he had too much cash flow passing through his own hands, and, uh, the bank was checking strictly, so his own account couldn't handle that much volume, uh, so he asked these friends, uh, if they could help him process the transactions, transfer his money to these friends' accounts first, and then have his friends transfer it to other accounts. Basically, they all used the excuse of not being able to transfer it directly to ask for their help.

So they were essentially participating in money laundering without realizing it, huh. Right.

Right, but what they said, I think some of it is true, but some of it isn't? Uh.

Uh-huh.

Whether it's fake, I'm not sure.

Uh-huh.

So, throughout these decades, not a single person discovered that their money.

Uh-huh.

Might be at risk? So far, nothing has been discovered.

Then what did Wang Qunshan do with this money? Did he spend it on high-end consumption, or did he use it for his daily life, or did he make some investments?

Uh, from what I've talked about with one of his close friends, uh, his friend said that, first, because he didn't actually have that much money, maybe ten million or so.

And not.

Said.

Oh, really? Because he worked in Shangqiu, Henan, right? It's not a first-tier city. Like, in a place like that, being able to earn over ten million is simply outstanding. That.

That's true, too. Uh, he bought a house in 2016, then another one in 2019, and he's changed his car three or four times. Right, and the most expensive one, well, the slightly cheaper one was over 400,000, which he drove for many years. And, uh, recently, he even bought one for 1.8 million, uh, that's a relatively large expenditure. Besides that, he bought a lot of.

Luxury watches, and including, like, LV and Dior bags, he had over a dozen, including two that were the size of shoeboxes, and all kinds of gold bracelets and such. This is what his friends have seen of his consumption on the surface. Additionally, that friend said, uh, Wang Quanan would sometimes tell him that he was following the leaders, participating in some catering businesses for prisons and schools in the city, as well as, uh, some landscaping businesses, and that he had invested money into them.

So, in everyone's eyes, including his depositors' eyes, it's like.

Wang Qunshan is getting richer and richer, right? But he is still working at this branch. Wouldn't they find it strange? Like, he drives a luxury car every day, wears luxury.

Watches, huh, that's what his friends saw. In the bank, including in front of depositors, his demeanor was still relatively modest. So in front of depositors, they only felt he was doing a good job; they hadn't seen him in that particularly wealthy state.

Uh, wow! Then he was simply living a double life! For a long time, the only person who might have known about this was his wife. Uh.

Right.

His.

Yes, right, I don't know if his friends knew. Uh, because didn't his friends later borrow money from him, and he would give his friends very high interest, of course.

He went.

Afterwards, a lot of the money wasn't paid back either.

Because you just mentioned that his crimes had several time nodes, right? Before we started, you mentioned an important node was 2019, uh, what happened in 2019?

When I was looking at some accounts.

Records, I found that in 2019, the number of accounts he was operating suddenly increased by several, and the transfer amounts also suddenly became larger, involving transfers of 400,000 or 800,000 at a time. Right, and besides that, several of them were those young merchants.

Which shows.

You can feel that his operations were becoming more mature. Before, he only dared to target some elderly people, or even, like, elderly people with physical disabilities, but later he moved towards some very young merchants in their thirties.

Uh-huh, then why didn't these young merchants notice? They aren't the type we talked about before, like the elderly who have no ability to operate, right? Uh, these merchants.

Well, actually, they were also people who ran small businesses, um, basically with a junior high school education, er, and not the kind of people who had a particularly deep understanding of mobile phones and operating systems. So many of them actually didn't download mobile banking apps themselves, er, and basically, um, operating those bank operating systems was something they didn't quite understand either. After Wang Qunshan operated it and bought financial products for them, he would have these depositors enter their passwords and verification codes like that—the same operation, but these depositors might be a bit more cautious than the elderly. Well, wouldn't they be able to see other people's transfers to them in their accounts?

Generally, printing bank statements is very troublesome, so these depositors wouldn't think about printing statements; they just wanted to check the account balance. And because the money had already been transferred over at that time, when they checked, the balance matched, so they wouldn't...

They felt at ease.

About that.

Right, and then.

After seeing the money deposited and finding out, oh, there was actually such a high interest rate, they continued to transfer larger amounts of money.

Wow, and how much money did the highest account have?

Er, the highest we currently understand is, er, over 2 million. Um, um, this is slightly clearer.

Regarding this point.

There are others, er, meaning Wang Qunshan helped them buy stocks or something, saying there was something like 9 million, right, but we didn't get an interview about this.

If during this process, Wang Qunshan's main job was maintaining the turnover of these twenty-odd accounts, would he still open up new battlefields? For example, um, if a new depositor needed his help, would he still think, "I should target him"? When did the growth of his twenty-odd accounts stop?

First of all, around 2016, there were just those two; then around 2019, a few more were added, and in between, they slowly and gradually increased, um, until, er, let me check the latest, it seems to be around 2021, and afterwards there was no longer any growth in accounts from these depositors. But later on, he opened up a new method, which was targeting his friends.

Um, it was earliest around 2023 when he would...

Find some of his former, er, many of his friends were actually former depositors of his on this side, except that early on, he, they bought financial products through him here, and basically it belonged to capital preservation for the long term. Then one time, his financial investment lost money, and this Wang Qunshan told him, "Transfer your money to a designated account of mine, I'll help you, er, do other investments, and I guarantee I can earn back the few thousand yuan you lost." So this, er, friend really did transfer the money to the designated account, and a few months later, the few thousand yuan he lost was indeed earned back, and then transferred back to his card. Because that was around 2023, the overall market conditions were not good, investments started to suffer some losses, er, and interest rates also started to drop.

So Wang Juan told him, er, asking whether they should do another one of our investments? This investment is, er, he said it's similar to not being an internal bank investment, but only internal bank employees can invest in such a financial product, and you also need to transfer the money to a designated account so we can help you operate it. This investment, he said, er, its threshold is 500,000, you must invest 500,000 at a time, and then.

One year.

About 5 percent interest or something.

However, did Wang Qunshan really need that much money? Um, actually, a bank is still a relatively decent job, huh, it can maintain his daily life, right?

Um.

Then gradually, for example, my consumption is getting larger and larger, and the lies I need to tell are also becoming more and more numerous. Why did he need to open up a new market in 2023? Saying I need to continue to scam other people, this is...

Um.

I think this is related to the pressure of his external environment on him, or is it that actually by that time, a rather distorted situation had already appeared in his inner heart? I must have a steady stream of money coming in now so I can...

Um.

Let me.

Be comfortable.

Oh.

I think it's a mix of several factors. Look, at that time he had already bought that car worth 400,000, but later in early 2025, just a few months before his suicide, he still wanted to buy another luxury car worth 1 million to 1.8 million, and the money had already been paid over. It can be seen that his desires were swelling more and more, and that's one point. On the other hand, I also suspect that his capital turnover might have indeed had some problems at that time.

Because these depositors, although, er, they would sometimes go check the balance, most of the time when a depositor puts their money there, they occasionally also need to withdraw money. Sometimes his money was too late to turn over, so he might need to borrow from some friends. Why do I have such an inference? It's because, um, the 500,000 he later borrowed from a friend's, er, account, um, then when the term expired and he needed to return it to this friend, you find he had no money to return, and then he looked for another friend of his again.

Ah.

She had her husband return 100,000 to this friend of hers, and then she borrowed another 400,000 from yet another friend to pay this one back.

You can tell.

Looking into his funds, he was, yeah.

Stripping it down.

Li Qiang patching the east wall.

Robbing Peter to pay Paul, that kind of situation, including the fact that whenever they went to the bank to withdraw money, the financial manager would tell them a day or two in advance so that they could prepare the cash. So they always gave the financial manager time to prepare. Every time they went to withdraw, he would deposit money into their accounts, so whenever he went to withdraw, he could always get the money out.

Wow, so Wang Qunshan was basically acting as a depositor, a wealth manager, and a reserve fund all by himself. It was almost like he had opened his own bank. Exactly, exactly, they also said.

They said it was like he had opened a small bank by himself.

Oh, um, so I'm actually very curious about Wang Qunshan now. From our perspective, his psychological resilience, including his calculation skills and ability to operate this whole thing, were really strong. What kind of background does he have? I later found out through investigation.

Through her friend and mother-in-law, I roughly learned that she is from a county under Shangqiu, and her family background should be quite good within their county. Her friend said that her father was originally a state-owned enterprise employee, and after retirement, you could often see Wang Junshan taking photos of the calligraphy her father wrote and posting them in his WeChat Moments, and they even had her father's calligraphy pasted up at home. So you can tell her father must be a very cultured person. Her mother was originally an employee of a bank in their county.

A very common career advancement path, right? Parents working in a bank, and getting their children to work in a bank too.

Right, right, right. And there were just two sisters in their family. Their grandparents' generation practiced traditional Chinese medicine. You can tell that the whole family was considered quite well-off in the county. What was her own educational background? She told others that she graduated from a financial school in Shangqiu, which is a vocational or junior college educational background.

Ah! But really, I feel that this kind of extraordinary calculation ability, including the ability to operate over 20 accounts, is not something an ordinary person could pull off. Although her process of transferring money and committing fraud was very simple—much simpler than we imagined.

Mm.

Well, I'm just thinking, generally speaking, if I were a depositor and trusted him, it would certainly be because his professional skills might be very strong, and he was very friendly to me, often helping me out. But the biggest reason must definitely be that he had a bank backing him up. I would think, the monk may run away, but the temple can't run away; the bank is still there after all, and it's a legitimate institution, right? Ah, but why was there no supervision at all from the bank over these operations of his? A single customer manager could just transfer other people's money like that? Was there really no one here to supervise him?

To respond to your previous point about everyone relying on trust in the bank, that is indeed true. When the depositors heard he had passed away, they weren't too worried at first; instead, they felt a lot of pity for him. Why did he commit suicide? Their first concern wasn't their own money—the monk may run away, but the temple can't run away, right? The bank would definitely have to take responsibility for them. It was only later, when they found out the bank wouldn't take responsibility for them, that their emotions completely broke down. And secondly, regarding the bank's regulatory level, there is a very interesting point here. When I was looking into materials, I found that back in 2016, when he started doing this operation, the year before that, some employees at their Postal Savings Bank had published a paper online discussing the management issues at their grassroots branches.

Chaos, chaos, yes, I can.

Read it out, this was a research paper published in 2015 by the Training Center of China Post Group Corporation, studying their Postal Savings Bank, and it talked about grassroots branches, the problems existing in their grassroots branches. It said that the quality of branch heads was low, business inspection personnel were lacking, internal control management was weak, irregular business operations were frequent, the power of branch heads to commit crimes could not be effectively controlled, risk prevention measures were reduced to mere formalities, and the rectification and improvement rate of hidden problems was low. This was a paper published the year before Wang Qunshan committed his crimes, and you can see that the grassroots level was indeed particularly chaotic at the time he operated. Combined with the fact that these elderly people had relatively low risk awareness, it gave him a huge scope for operation.

Before making this episode, I also saw that, actually, it should be the China Banking Regulatory Commission or the China Securities Regulatory Commission that would ban many of these specific personnel from holding professional qualifications, right?

Mm.

And then, it actually mentioned quite a few cases. At that time, I saw there was a female bank employee from Zhengzhou who fabricated financial products and defrauded depositors of over 9 million, all of which was used to tip live streamers.

Mm.

And then there's the case where a bank manager in Taizhou defrauded clients of over 60 million yuan, also under the guise of selling wealth management products. We all know that for us, a bank is like a piece of national infrastructure; it is certainly a relatively stable entity. But in reality, banks like these—they are often smaller banks, or smaller branches, or perhaps they aren't one of the 'Big Four' but rather local banks, or maybe commercial banks—within these types of institutions, there is actually a massive amount of regulatory loopholes, meaning there is a lot of room for such risks. Because I actually saw in your article that banks are currently under immense business pressure. As ordinary employees, they do have a certain motivation to reach into the depositors' wallets.

Is that the logic they use, that the pressure to meet performance targets is high?

Yes, it is.

Leading to gray-area operations being viewed as normal at the grassroots branch level?

Yes, exactly.

For example, I interviewed many grassroots employees at the Postal Savings Bank of China, as well as wealth management managers and other bank staff. They mentioned that, for instance, when they want to get someone to buy these wealth management products—because they are hard to sell right now—

Yes.

Often, the customer might lose money, or they might have to buy more each time, so they have other methods. It's like, 'I'll give you a rebate.' Privately, if you buy this, besides the interest you get from the product, I will also give you my own commission. They might even spend their own money to buy them high-end tea or regular holiday gifts. Sometimes, just to get the client to buy the product, they might even invite them to nightclubs, which touches on gray areas. But in order to secure the performance targets, these operations are practically done in the open at grassroots bank branches.

We don't really understand the banking system very well. In my impression, back when our classmates went to work as bank tellers, they would say they needed to attract depositors, and the drive to attract savings was very strong. But now it seems the drive to maintain depositors isn't as strong, perhaps because interest rates are already quite low, and for a bank, ordinary savings business isn't their core business anymore.

Exactly, exactly.

But now, like you just mentioned, businesses like wealth management or loans—their value to the bank is actually very high, right?

Yes, for a bank, making money means issuing loans. They can earn the interest spread, right? Like the Postal Savings Bank, its grassroots branches aren't allowed to handle loan business, so their only option is the wealth management business. And wealth management, in every bank, is considered a high-risk business because loan business itself is high-risk, so they generally don't let grassroots branches handle it. For a bank, wealth management is an intermediary business; I'm just helping other companies sell their products. The bank doesn't have to put up anything else, right? If you lose money, you, the depositor, lose it yourself; if you make money, you make it yourself. The part the bank earns is the commission they get from these other companies for acting as an agent. If you close a deal, they give the bank a certain percentage. It's pure profit. So, this business started to spread widely across all banks around 2011.

This is the asset management business mentioned in your article, right?

Yes. Actually, they find that the main group targeted for this asset management business is indeed elderly people who are older or, well, who don't really understand these financial products.

Well, not necessarily.

For wealth management.

Actually, all kinds of people buy wealth management products. It's just that the ones they happen to choose are this group of elderly people who have lower risk awareness, or perhaps merchants with lower levels of education. It's equivalent to them choosing people with lower financial literacy to commit the fraud.

Yes. I feel that in the minds of these elderly users, it's still the bank they knew before—that it must have a huge capital background and the ability to provide a safety net. But in reality, the bank they actually walk into has already become an organization under operational pressure, or even one that needs to push asset management products. So, it feels like there is a mismatch in this perception.

Yes.

And you just mentioned that the Postal Savings Bank actually has a special model, which is called the 'self-operated plus agency' model. I didn't even know about this before I read your article.

This is indeed very unique; it is the only one of its kind in China. When I spoke with experts at the time, it seemed that such a model does not exist abroad either. It is a postal system, but in the early days, because there was no online system, people working away from home who wanted to send money back had to do so through the postal service. So, it gradually developed that way, with the savings business being essentially a service for remitting money.

Uh-huh.

But, uh, similar to its early years, it only had deposit services and no loan services, which meant it couldn't really make much money. So, in the early 2000s, they established the Postal Savings Bank of China (PSBC). But after establishing the PSBC, what were they supposed to do with all the small postal outlets that were already handling deposits? You couldn't just shut them down.

Oh, so that's why they...

They came up with a self-operated plus agency model. Some postal enterprise outlets belonged to the agency category, while the newly established PSBC outlets were self-operated. When I interviewed someone in a county, there were three self-operated outlets in the county seat, while all the surrounding towns and villages were the original agency outlets.

Outlets. So, because the management itself was split into two systems, there was a possibility of lax supervision. Can it be understood that the management of self-operated outlets is more rigorous, while the supervision of agency outlets is relatively loose? Yes, yes, because after all, they are two different things. Theoretically, self-operated outlets could manage the agency outlets below them, but...

Right, it crosses over...

Uh, it crosses a management...

Segment. The PSBC can only manage the business of the agency outlets, but everything else—the personnel, the tasks, the assets—is all managed by the postal enterprise.

This...

At the time, I interviewed an employee at a self-operated outlet in a county who had previously managed personnel at agency outlets for a while, and he mentioned that it was impossible to manage them. He said he didn't even know who was hired at the agency outlets, what their educational background or character was, and he had no idea. He didn't know about personnel deployment either; the agency outlets would just send over a form saying, 'I'm transferring so-and-so to another place,' and you just had to agree.

Oh, so, uh, does that mean the outlet where Wang Qunshan worked was actually an agency outlet?

Yes, yes, exactly.

He was always at...

An agency outlet.

Oh, so that is actually a complete vacuum zone! Like, for example, my hiring of Wang Qunshan to work there had nothing to do with the PSBC directly.

It didn't have much to do with it. Even in 2023, the PSBC published a paper mentioning the difficulties of managing across these institutions. And, uh, another point mentioned earlier is that, since in many cases the money would be transferred to his own account—I previously interviewed many experts in the financial field, and at first, they felt that it is indeed very difficult for a bank to supervise things so meticulously. But when I mentioned that the depositors' money was being transferred directly into his own account—

And this...

Account wasn't even an account at another bank, but directly a PSBC account—these experts noted that the bank's management was far too crude.

Right, right. I mean, we generally assume that if an account receives large transfers, especially if they are frequent, it would trigger a warning. Some banks now, to prevent fraud and such, won't even let you make a large transfer of 50,000 yuan without an appointment. So, for someone like Wang Qunshan, who was constantly moving other people's money in and out of his own account, it was a high-risk account. I think if it were a legitimate bank, it should have been flagged.

Ah, well, this brings up a change in recent years, because monitoring large or abnormal capital flows in accounts is something that has only happened in recent years.

Uh-huh.

And in recent years, he hasn't been using his own account.

Oh, he just...

Right.

Dispersed. Yes, so, to...

Other accounts. And actually, his transfers weren't that frequent, because he would only transfer when new deposits came in; he would just transfer once.

So this...

One thing is that even through those anti-fraud systems, it is very difficult to identify.

But, uh...

During his early period, from 2016 to 2021, he transferred directly to his own PSBC account, and that not being discovered was a huge management issue. We used to think that we are now in a digital era.

So...

Maybe, uh, the digital monitoring of various outlets should be quite complete. However, as late as 2023, this article still noted that agency outlets had not established this data monitoring system; they had not effectively monitored these accounts.

Oh, that is actually really dangerous. There are a lot of these scattered, small-scale operations; although they are not qualified to issue loans, they are qualified to manage wealth. Their accounts are actually mostly high-value accounts, right? But these accounts themselves are outside the spotlight of regulation. If I happen to be someone with very low moral standards, and someone puts a huge sum of money right in front of me, it's really hard for anyone to control themselves. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

This brings up how banks monitor their employees.

Right.

Uh, back then, when I interviewed that employee from the Postal Savings Bank, she mentioned that earlier regulations were extremely perfunctory.

Uh, basically.

Yeah, every quarter or every year, they would hand out a six-page document with a lot of items listed at the bottom, asking whether you had participated in unauthorized wealth management sales (fei dan), and whether you had...

What is unauthorized wealth management sales (fei dan)?

Unauthorized sales means that a wealth manager sets up a financial product outside on their own, which might be...

Ah.

...a financial product that doesn't meet the bank's entry standards and isn't very safe, but they package it to look like a bank's internal financial product and then get customers to buy it, ultimately leading to a financial crash or trouble. They ask you whether you have participated in such sales, whether you run your own business, or if there are any bribery behaviors, and for each item, they ask you to check whether it's normal or abnormal. And...

You grade yourself? Really? Yes. You grade yourself. If I grade myself, could I? Even if I committed a crime, would I check 'abnormal'? Right? Exactly.

So they said outright: "Well, of course I always check 'normal'."

Right, right.

Yeah.

So there is no superior oversight or peer review; it's just a self-evaluation mechanism, right? Yes, exactly, yes.

That employee mentioned that she felt this kind of behavior wasn't really meant to monitor risk; it was just meant to shirk responsibility.

Man, that really sounds like a totally unbelievable crime that could just keep going for ten years like that. When we were reading this article, we had a particularly strong feeling, which was that their targets were all aimed at these elderly people. Since you interviewed a lot of such depositors back then, what was their daily life like, for instance? Why did they develop such a close trust with the bank managers? At first, I would have thought these elderly people might be among those who lost their only child.

Not really.

Or rather, it's...

Their children are not around, living far away—after talking with them, you find out that their relationships with their children are actually quite close. However, their living spaces are not in the same location. These elderly people, like retirees or those who used to do business, have a very high demand for personal space, so they are not willing to live with their children. Because they say that, after all, there will always be some minor arguments, so they usually live about two or three kilometers away from their children, and then regularly call them to chat. In addition, because these elderly people are capable and have money, right, they tend to be on guard against their children.

Oh, oh, so they don't trust their own children, thinking they might be plotting to get their inheritance, is that it?

It's just human nature, and it's understandable. Indeed, they once told their children, for example, roughly how much money they had. Then their children might have started a business and lost money, or perhaps a child wanted to study abroad, and they couldn't immediately come up with that much cash, so they would think about asking to borrow it from their parents. But then they would say...

About when would they pay it back?

Nobody knew when it would be paid back either. So, to avoid such things happening, later on, how much money they had in their hands was simply something they wouldn't tell their children. And the children also sensed their parents' mindset, and said they could understand. So actually, some of their children would drive and accompany these elderly parents to the bank to handle business. But the children would sit on the sofa in the lobby and wait, while their parents brought their bank cards to the counter to handle business themselves, or Wang Qunshan would help them handle it. The children would deliberately keep a distance from their parents' money, so a spatial separation was created.

Right.

So this really makes you feel that, because assets themselves are a very private matter, even if they are my children, I might not have enough trust in them. But for these elderly people, they want their money to make more money, or to save it for their own retirement, yet they don't know what method to use to keep hold of this money. I feel a kind of deep helplessness when looking at their accounts.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Is it true that many of them only knew about savings?

They also just listened.

After being introduced by group members, they learned, oh, they could buy some wealth management products, so they bought some. And later, they were introduced to the idea that stocks could also be bought for them, so they bought some stocks too, yeah.

It's all like that.

Yeah, yeah.

However, there is just this feeling, because I also read your article at that time, and I shared it in my Moments, it just made me think, because the residential compound I live in is one with a relatively severe aging population. Back then, there were very many elderly people, and banks would frequently come to our compound to handle all kinds of business and make all kinds of promotions. Especially in the dead of winter, when they gave out those winter-storage Chinese cabbages, they would have everyone go downstairs to pick up a cabbage. I went down and picked up a cabbage myself, and after picking it up, I scanned a QR code. It must have been Bank of Ningbo. Actually, when I scanned the code, I didn't grant any authorization either, hmm. But in the following month or two, banks kept calling me endlessly, and then they would talk about things like, for example, asking you to take out a loan, or telling you we have some financial products you can buy, and things like that. So I thought, they are actually using this kind of very cheap customer-acquisition method, like giving you a cabbage, giving you some eggs, sending you some cooking oil and rice, or something. But what they are actually targeting is a very high-net-worth group of people, which is retired elderly folks. The environment these elderly people find themselves in, it's not just the issue of being far away from their children, it's that there is a very strong feeling. When I saw it back then, I felt I was extremely worried about my parents. In their view, the world hasn't changed that fast, but in reality, the world is changing with each passing day. Including, for example, the changes in banks that you just talked about, and also how the bank's system actually operates, including how I use mobile banking, how I link my accounts, how I scan my face—all these things are actually very difficult for parents, because. My dad still often runs to the bank, but he carries a passbook. He will frequently go to the bank to check, oh, how is my money growing in the passbook now? Actually, this kind of change brought by the era is very unimaginable to them. But these elderly people seem to have no way at all to keep up with this era. When I looked at it, it just felt very sad, and very helpless, hmm.

Oh, right, what you said is indeed true, which is that for these elderly people, back when they originally used passbooks, their money was never tampered with passively.

Later, later on, then.

Wang Quanquan just persuaded him, saying that nowadays everything has been changed to bank cards, so she persuaded him to switch to a bank card. After switching to a bank card, he couldn't immediately see the balance every time he made a deposit or withdrawal, so his money ran into problems.

In the end, who is going to pay for this money? Is there really no possibility of any compensation left? Hmm, as for now, they are sort of clearing out some of Wang Quanshan's assets, and then they had previously given some responses to these victims, saying it seems they can probably compensate about, uh, twenty percent to thirty percent or so. This is.

It's just.

His assets can compensate, and besides, uh, they also hope that the bank can bear some responsibility. At that time, uh, they went to find the bank, including going to find things like the CSRC to demand an explanation, and then they received a reply letter, and the general meaning of the reply was that the bank has no responsibility, meaning the bank's deposit, that this deposit business has no problem, but we found the problem from it, it's not a deposit business.

Right, it's a wealth management business. Yes, yes, yes, so that is.

It can be seen that they are evading this matter.

But I.

Later went to check some, uh, materials, like past similar cases regarding compensation, and as I saw, the bank probably also bears about twenty percent to thirty percent of such responsibility.

However, in your article there is one thing, which is also the ending you wrote back then? I felt it was just so spine-chilling! Which is that when an elderly person feels for themselves, "I am guarding my lifetime savings," but in the end finds out it was swindled away like this, they are actually extremely desolate. Even if they have to go through legal processes, for them, uh, the drain on their energy, including this kind of thing, was actually very huge. Yet in such a helpless process, she just passed away. I feel that scene truly, uh, is just very heartbreaking.

This elderly person is the one I mentioned earlier, who had over one million, and both he and his wife were over seventy years old. In the early days, uh, they ran that, uh, small grocery store in the countryside, and later they ran, uh, they sold refrigerators, sold some of these household appliances, stepping out of the countryside step by step to the county town, and finally coming to Shangqiu City, and buying a house in Shangqiu City, sort of accumulating this sum of money through a lifetime of hard work. Because they didn't have pensions, this was entirely a sum of money for their retirement after they stopped working. It was around 2016 or 2017 that they deposited it, keeping it for eight or nine years, and they had always trusted the Fangquan very deeply. So at that time, uh, when they found out in the bank that the money inside was gone, her husband instantly collapsed directly to the ground, and was later sent to the hospital, being transferred through several hospitals. And in the middle, she had always pinned her hopes on this money being able to come back, but in the end, she found out this money still didn't come back. And finally she herself couldn't take it anymore either. Afterwards, I talked about this whole matter with, uh, interviewing some experts, and then.

Everyone.

After understanding this matter more clearly, basically everyone feels that the bank must be held responsible. In this regard, the problems in bank supervision are significant and very obvious.

By relying solely on the convenience of his position, he was able to deceive everyone. We all previously thought that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s strict supervision was extremely powerful, right? Look at me, I am overseas, and they are still monitoring me. But why can these people easily commit crimes, embezzle so much money, and continue to go undetected for so many years? In fact, the reason is very simple: because the CCP's supervision and regulation are all focused on ordinary people like us, because only ordinary people are their enemies and the only group they fear. Of course, the premise of this fear is that the people unite. Alright, the above is all the content for this episode. If you would like to support me, please join the membership channel. I also especially look forward to chatting with everyone in real-time during member live streams. That is all for this episode, see you next time.