In Shanghai, a woman born in the mid-1990s, had a stable job with a decent salary, but her fate took a drastic turn due to a borrowing incident.
According to a report by Knews on April 23, Zhang, who is now 30 years old, started working for a third-party human resources outsourcing company in Shanghai in 2018. Her job involved recruiting dispatched employees for clients, verifying employment situations, and confirming salary payments.
Zhang explained that she made a mistake on the computer that resulted in some losses. In order to keep her job, without consulting with the company, she borrowed money on her own to solve the issue.
Initially, she had accumulated debts of around two to three hundred thousand yuan. Because her personal credit was poor, she couldn’t get a bank loan. She chose to borrow money from a lending institution to temporarily alleviate the situation, only to find out later that it was a usurious lender. The interest kept accumulating, causing her debt to quickly balloon.
She borrowed 100,000 yuan from the usurious lender, but after deducting various fees, she only received a little over 70,000 yuan. The lender demanded that she repay 200,000 yuan within 10 days. If she failed to do so, they would incessantly call, text, and even threaten her downstairs at her workplace. To repay the debt, Zhang had to resort to desperate measures, eventually falling into a quicksand of usurious loans, which led her to devise a crooked plan.
Zhang discovered that the company’s audit process was conducted through emails, and by manipulating emails, one could fabricate the number of dispatched employees. Taking advantage of this loophole, Zhang began to fraudulently obtain salaries from the company.
According to statistics, Zhang fabricated a total of 54 dispatched employees and embezzled over 5 million yuan from the company, with over 4 million of it being used to pay off usurious interests.
In August 2024, Zhang surrendered to the police and returned 630,000 yuan of the embezzled money. In the end, Zhang was sentenced to four years in prison for embezzlement and fined 100,000 yuan by the local court.