The Aussie Diamond Dealer
When I was working as a consultant to a High Street bank, I heard some good tales. Here’s one.
A few months before the bank started processing accounts by computer, a guy walks into a smaller City branch of the bank and asks to see the manager. he said he was an Aussie diamond-dealer and he’d come to England to make a few contacts, do a bit of trading and have a holiday. He had a reference from a bank in Australia and said he wanted to open an account. he did say though, that a lot of cash would be going into and out of the account, as he dealt with his clients. He also told the manager that in a few months, he’d take all the money old, would then convert it into diamonds and go home.
Over the next few months, things went as the dealer said. Money flowed into and out of the account and he became well known in the branch. He’d wvwn entertained the manager to a couple of meals and was thought of as a good customer.
Then one day, he came in and told the manager, that he would be leaving for Australia in a couple of weeks and of course would be taking out all of his money in cash.
Just before he would be drawing out the money, the branch of the bank was going to be computerised. The day it was, someone replaced a lot of those little paying-in slips in the branch that we used to juse, with with ones that contained the diamond dealer’s account number.
In all of the chaos of the new computerisation, a lot more money was paid into his account and it is believed the diamond dealer walked out with a cool quarter of a million, never to be seen again.
On checking, they found that the scam had been used before to steal a few thousand. Was that a dummy run? The police did find that the reference from the Australian bank was false and that perhaps the thief wasn’t even from down under.
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