The Rotorua couple some are calling accidental millionaires have flown to China and still have close to $4 million of the loot.
Interpol and New Zealand police are searching for the Rotorua
service station owner and his girlfriend after they gained a
multi-million windfall through a bank's blunder.
Westpac Bank says it's vigorously pursuing the money it credited to
an account by mistake.
Police have revealed the runaways headed to Hong Kong after
abandoning their car at Auckland Airport.
The couple have been reported to be Leo Gao and his New Zealand
girlfriend Cara Young.
ONE News tracked down Gao's old ute at Auckland International Airport, the scene of the couple's getaway.
Police are now looking for them in Hong Kong and in China's bustling Beijing.
Back in New Zealand, Westpac has confirmed it accidentally gave Gao an overdraft facility with a $10 million dollar limit.
Westpac says the customer had in place a temporary overdraft facility with a limit up to $100,000 and when the bank sought to formalise that limit an error occurred which opened up the limit to $10 million.
The bank says the customer then attempted to unlawfully transfer amounts totalling around $6.7 million.
To date $2.9 million has been recovered and the bank is continuing to vigorously pursue the outstanding amount of $3.8 million, says Westpac New Zealand Media relations Manager Craig Dowling.
"That will involve looking at where the money might have gone and the parties that might have been involved in receiving that money and recovering it from them," he says.
Dowling says the incident appears to have been as a result of human error and did not involve the Rotorua Branch directly.
"We have taken and continue to take all necessary steps to prevent a mistake such as this happening again."
The couple appear to have successfully vanished.
Every tip or potential lead ONE New were given on Friday ended at locked houses and cases of mistaken identity.
The hunt for the stash of cash has also caught up another small city. Cara Young's mother lives in Blenheim.
She has called in sick at her hair salon and like everything else, her house was a dead end and shut up tight when ONE News called.
The mother is believed to have headed south to Milton in south Otago where the family used to live.
The accidental millionaires disappeared on May 7, telling friends they were going on holiday.
ONE News has been told they called their flatmate from Queenstown saying they had come into some money and wouldn't be back.
The next day, the petrol station Gao owned in Rotorua was put into receivership.
The service station has been stripped of its name, BP Barnett.
Bill Barnett, who opened the business back in 1962, can't believe it has ended like this.
"After all the years of building up a business and all the struggles, to suddenly see everything stripped like this, it's not very good," he says.
And while ONE News can't track down the former Rotorua couple, a Wellington man, Andy Curran, man faced a similar dilemma in the 1990s.
"Among one of our clients we had a cheque coming in for 60 thousand dollars and instead of the 60 thousand dollars we got a cheque for 60 million," says Curran, a former property developer.
He made do with a photo of the cheque, not a life on the run.
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