A Hong Kong court has imposed a four-year prison sentence on a former retail banker who accepted more than US$470,000 in Tether (USDT) to lend the appearance of legitimacy to forged standby letters of credit and related documents with a combined face value exceeding US$1.6 billion.
Lam Chun-yin, 32, previously worked as a relationship manager in the consumer banking division at the Causeway Bay branch of China Construction Bank (Asia).
His official duties involved serving individual retail customers.
He had no authority to process business credit facilities or letters of credit, and the bank never assigned him those functions.
On 18 September 2026, the District Court sentenced him after he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy for an agent to accept advantages.
Judge Ernest Lin Kam-hung described the offending as more serious than typical comparable cases because it involved fabricated bank instruments that could damage Hong Kong’s standing as an international financial centre and expose the bank to substantial potential losses.
The judge began with a six-year starting point and reduced the term by one-third to reflect the guilty plea, arriving at four years. He also ordered restitution of about HK$3.7 million—the Hong Kong-dollar equivalent of the bribes—to CCB (Asia).
The scheme unfolded between April and June 2022. Vesttoo, an overseas fintech firm that has since ceased operations, ran a digital platform for insurance-linked investment deals.
Participants were expected to supply bank-issued standby letters of credit as security so that, if an investor failed to meet obligations, the issuing bank would stand behind the payment.
Yu Po Holdings Limited joined the platform as an investor in early 2022.
A criminal syndicate then arranged for Lam to present himself as the designated CCB contact for issuing those instruments on Yu Po’s behalf.
In return for Tether payments totalling more than US$470,000, Lam authenticated multiple standby letters of credit that falsely purported to have been issued by CCB, together with two collateral letters that falsely claimed to have been issued by Yu Po and endorsed by CCB.
The documents together represented more than US$1.6 billion.
CCB (Asia) discovered the irregularity during an internal review, reported the matter to the Independent Commission Against Corruption, and cooperated fully with the investigation.
Subsequent inquiries confirmed that neither CCB nor its affiliated companies had issued any of the instruments.
The ICAC has obtained arrest warrants for other people implicated in the arrangement and noted that using cryptocurrency to route corrupt payments did not prevent detection.
The case underscores how digital assets can be used to conceal illicit transfers while still leaving a trail that investigators can follow. It also illustrates the reputational risk that even a mid-level employee can create when bank documents are misused to support large-scale investment structures.