£5000 GONE

Taranaki Daily News, 3 January 1930, Page 16

£5000 GONE

CLEVER BANK SWINDLE

FORGED WARRANT.

Sydney, Dec. 21.

Ko clue to the perpetrators of the remarkable swindle by which, the Australian Bank of Commerce in Sydney was robbed of £5OOO has yet been discovered by the police, and it seems as though the trick ■will go down in- history as one of the “cleanest” on record. For nearly a week the details of this swindle were kept secret, perhaps because the whole transaction did not redound to the credit of the banking system. Presenting a warrant bearing the official stamps of the National Bank, the thief, or thieves, obtained £5OOO and disappeared without raising the slight, esf suspicion. The robbery occurred between two and three o’clock one after l noon last week, and it was not until two days later that news of it reached the detective office. The delay was due to the procedure under which the banks work in connection with the payment of money. The warrant which the swindler used was handed in just before closing time one afternoon. It was not until the following day that the warrant was forwarded to the Commonwealth Bank for dispatch to . the headquarters of the National Bank, and' further delay ensued before it reached a branch of the National Bank, from which it was purported that the warrant on the Australian Bank of Commerce for £5OOO had been issued. All this procedure occupied practically two days, and when the warrant eventually came under the scrutiny of the officials of the branch they saw at a glance that it was a brazen forgery. The swindler had not even bothered to give a colourable imitation of the signatures of the two National Bank officials whose names appeared on the warrant. No doubt the officials at the Australian Bank of Commerce who accepted the warrant as genuine were taken off their guard by the almost daily routine of one bank finding itself short of notes requisitioning a supply from another.

The swindle was further facilitiated by a telephone message purporting to come from the National Park branch and to have been received at the Australian Bank of Commerce some time before the swindler arrived. The person wh'o spoke did not ask for any particular department dr official. The message was to the effect that the National Bank was sending over a warrant to the Australian Bank of Commerce for £5OOO. When the messenger walked in a little later and put down the warrant on the counter there was nothing to excite suspicion. The messenger was middle-aged, well-dressed, and bore an air of the highest respectability. He was handed the £5OOO in £5 and £lO denominations, and he did not linger to count the notes. Still, that is not regarded as unusual, for the trust that one bank has in another is so implicit that officials rarely check a bundle of notes after it has been vouched for by the officers of another bank. What makes the recovery at the notes more difficult is that the numbers of the notes were not taken before they were issued as a result of the forged' warrant. There is no doubt, however, that the thief was familiar with the “inside” of bank working. He was bo calm and matter-of-fact as he leaned nonchalantly on the counter of the bank while officials were making up the bundle of notes, s-that no one seemed to think that he was not all he professed to be. The question that is most exercising the minds of the detectives is: Where did the swindler obtain the warrant on which he forged the order for the payment of £5000? The thief was either able to secure a new warrant form or he poked up an old one and had a replica printed. The progress that has been made by the detectives in their inquiries does not suggest the likelihood.of an arrest.