We’ve featured a variety of complex and clever embezzlement cases on Oddity Central over the years, but this story isn’t about one of those. This one is about a bold small bank branch manager who used cartoonish play money to steal from his workplace.
South Korean news media recently revealed that a branch manager of a Saemaul Credit Union in Gyeongju, North Gyeongsang Province, confessed to taking considerable amounts of money from the bank vault and trying to cover up his actions by replacing the banknotes with fake bills. But what really attracted people’s attention was the funny-looking bills he used.
Photos and videos of the play money used in the embezzlement scheme went viral on social media, inspiring a variety of funny comments from flabbergasted netizens. The photos showed cartoonish replicas of 50,000-won banknotes featuring cartoon animals like ducks and bears.
The obviously fake bills could be spotted from a mile away, but the bank manager, whose identity has not been revealed, allegedly took advantage of the fact that no one actually checked the vault. Chosun Daily reported that this was a very small bank branch with very few employees and that the manager made sure that he was the one depositing the money in the vault every day.
When he went into the vault, the manager swapped some of the real bills with the play money he had allegedly ordered online. It’s unclear how long the man’s embezzlement scheme lasted, but at one point, another employee reported his unusual behavior to the higher-ups, and the Saemaul Credit Union launched an investigation.
It didn’t take long for the investigators to figure out what the man had done, but according to reports, the bank failed to immediately alert the authorities, opting to solve its problems internally. In a press release, Saemaul Credit Union stated that it had fired the bank manager responsible in this case, adding that he had returned the stolen money and that the bank considers the matter closed.
