Chinese Man opens bank account with 5m yuan in old, mouldy stacks, breaks counting machines
The devices took seven hours to count the total and even ‘burned out’ one unit, according to Chinese report
Imagine opening a bank account with $780,000 with crumpled and folded up old $5, $10 and $20 banknotes and breaking a counting machine down. A Chinese man did just that. He took 5 million yuan (HK$6.04 million/$780,000) of old banknotes to the bank to open an account and broke the machines as they tried to count it.
According to South China Morning Post, the man surnamed Li from Sichuan province carried eight bags filled with 5 million yuan in cash, damp, mouldy banknotes. to a branch of the Agricultural Bank of China to open an account.
The bank accepted his requested and the staff took to counting the huge horde of cash. Unfortunately, the counting devices took seven hours to count the total and eventually ‘burned out’ one unit.
According to the Agriculture Bank of China, the machines took seven hours to count the total – from 1pm to 8pm. “Normally, counting banknotes will take approximately three hours,” one employee from the bank was quoted as saying.
According to the bank employee, the money that Lee brought to the bank was stacked in bundles, and the dampness made it difficult to separate the notes from each other. He said that the bank staff used electric hair dryers to dry and separate the notes before feeding them to the counting machine.
This is not the first time this has happened in China. In May 2015, a monk in Shanghai carried than 200,000 coins, each worth 10 fen, to buy water heaters for his temple at an appliance store. The coins weighed 716 KG in total and the shop took 13 hours to count the coins and give the water heaters the monk wanted.