In a major development, a court in Hong Kong has handed a four-year prison term to a former China Construction Bank (Asia) employee who took cryptocurrency payments to confirm the legitimacy of documents the bank never produced. Judge Ernest Lin Kam-hung of the District Court also ordered the accused identified as Lam Chun-yin, 32, to repay roughly HK$3.7 million, an amount matching the value of the bribes he collected.
Lam admitted to conspiring to accept bribes. Over a period running from April to June 2022, he received more than $470,000 in Tether (USDT). In return, he vouched for several fabricated standby letters of credit, as well as two collateral letters, all connected to a fraud involving more than $1.6 billion.
The Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), which investigated the case, said Lam was a customer relationship manager at the bank’s Causeway Bay retail branch, where he served individual consumers. Commercial credit facilities were outside his remit, and the bank had never given him permission to deal with letters of credit.
The case reaches well beyond a single branch. Vesttoo Limited, a fintech company, operated a platform for insurance-linked investments, and participants there had to put up bank-issued standby letters of credit as security. Once Yu Po Holdings joined as an investor, a group of people arranged for Lam to serve as the CCB contact responsible for checking the paperwork.
According to the ICAC, he conspired with a Vesttoo department head and other associates. The letters he confirmed wrongly claimed to have come from the bank, while the two collateral letters wrongly presented themselves as issued and endorsed by Yu Po.
The deception came apart when CCB (Asia) carried out an internal investigation. Investigators at the bank concluded that neither the lender nor any of its affiliated companies had produced the letters of credit or the collateral documents at the center of the matter.
