The Downfall of a Trusted Employee
The girl Wang Meili (name changed), 35 years old, is a financial manager at a state-owned enterprise, having worked there for nearly ten years. Throughout her time there, she gradually advanced from a regular financial assistant to a financial management position responsible for daily income and expenditure and bookkeeping, earning the trust of both leaders and colleagues. However, no one expected that this serious and reliable employee would fall into a path of crime that lasted 5 years.
Starting in 2012, she began to spend extravagantly, but her family’s income could not keep up. Thus, she had to rely on online loans to maintain her high spending. By 2019, Wang Meili had accumulated debts exceeding 200,000 RMB (731 million VND) and was unable to pay them off. That was when she began to focus her attention on the public funds of the unit she was working for.
Wang Meili’s corruption did not happen quickly, but occurred step by step through exploration. Initially, she only exploited loopholes in her unit’s financial management system to take small amounts of cash for personal use. After her first successful attempt, she felt anxious and uneasy, fearing detection by colleagues or leaders. However, over time, as no one noticed, she gradually became bolder. She then began looking for more covert methods and discovered laxity in the unit’s cost auditing process, which led her to the idea of forging expense documents. With the embezzled amounts increasing, her criminal methods also became more sophisticated and diverse.
From December 2019 to November 2024, Wang Meili took advantage of her position as a financial manager to create false documents, set up non-existent expenses, sign mismatched checks, and forge expense documents, embezzling a total of over 7 million RMB (25.6 billion VND) of public funds, which she could not repay, and spent all of this money. After the incident was exposed, her bank account was frozen, leaving only 800 RMB (nearly 3 million VND).
An Illusory Life and Costly Consequences
Shockingly, the colossal amount of money Wang Meili embezzled was not used to improve her life or invest in business but was mostly funneled into online streaming platforms. She accidentally came across a livestream platform and became captivated by the young, handsome, and talented male streamers on there, as well as the vibrant atmosphere in the broadcast room.
“At first, I just went to the platform to listen to them sing, occasionally spending a few hundred to buy a small gift to encourage them to showcase their talents,” Wang Meili recalled. “Then, from competing on the donation leaderboard, I gradually became addicted and couldn’t stop. But with limited financial conditions, I couldn’t meet the demand to gift streamers, so I started using public funds…”
The amounts Wang Meili used for gifts kept increasing, from several hundred to several thousand, then to tens of thousands of RMB. After each gift-giving, when she heard her name called in the broadcast room and was affectionately referred to as “dear sister” by the streamers, along with heartfelt thanks for her support and witnessing the envious eyes of other fans, she felt a deep satisfaction that she had never experienced before. Faced with the sweet words of the streamers, Wang Meili became immersed in that false admiration and completely forgot that the money was obtained illegally.
Over those 5 years, of the 7 million RMB of public funds she embezzled, over 6 million was spent gifting to streamers on the livestreaming platform. The truth could not be hidden forever; Wang Meili’s corrupt behavior and abuse of public funds were eventually discovered. The prosecution agency determined that Wang Meili committed corruption and brought charges against her in court.
According to 163