How A Credit Card Led to One of Australia’s Biggest Missing Persons Cases
On the 19th of May 2000, the father of a Hong Kong exchange student who was residing in Brisbane, Australia, reported their son’s ‘Bank of East Asia’ debit card as stolen. Little did anyone know, this card was about to be linked to not only one of Australia’s largest credit card frauds, but also one of the nations longest running mysteries: The disappearance and suspected murder of Vietnamese-Australian man Quyen Tu Au.
Quyen Tu Au, who moved from Vietnam to South Australia in 1985, lived in an apartment in Rosewater Lodge, less than a thirty minute drive from South Australia’s bustling capital city of Adelaide. Though Quyen appeared to keep mostly to himself, he still had a relatively close group of acquaintances whose house he’d spend nights at every now and then.
On the 19th of May 2000, however, Quyen was not at his Rosewater Lodge home. Instead, he’d chosen to go on a holiday to the upper Australian state of Queensland and spend time in its capital city of ‘Brisbane’ — a beautiful area on the edge of the Brisbane River, the largest river in south-east Queensland. It’s here that Quyen’s made his first big mistake: he stole the debit card of an exchange student and managed to obtain its pin-number.
It wasn’t until the 28th of July that Quyen attempted to use this credit card and, to his surprise, the withdrawal was successful. This began a downward spiral for Quyen as he began using the card several times each day, taking out only small amounts of money at different ATM’s, all run by the same ‘NAB’ bank, to avoid any suspicion.
Quyen knew there was a lot of money on this debit card but what he didn’t know was that whenever the stolen debit card was used, the card would activate a specific glitch in the ATM’s system, resulting in unlimited withdrawals.
At the end of Quyen’s 18 day fiasco, he’d made a total of 467 transactions, been caught on ATM CCTV 41 times, and had withdrawn a total amount of $327,120. Then, on the 15th of August 2000, Quyen Tu Au disappeared.
It wasn’t until 2 years later that Quyen was reported missing, but it wasn’t by his friends or family, it was by the Major Fraud Section of the South Australian Police, who had become very concerned for Quyen’s welfare, and for good reasons.
See, Quyen’s disappearance didn’t mark the end of the stolen credit card’s activity. Instead, it marked the beginning. From the day of Quyen’s disappearance to the 19th of October 2000, a whopping $5,999,200 was withdrawn from the stolen card over a further 6,330 transactions.
With all this money going missing, it was safe to say that banks were becoming suspicious and began to suspect a potential fraudster was at play. They certainly weren’t wrong and on the 19th of August, a shopping plaza ATM finally swallowed the debit card and police were contacted, leaving a acquaintance of the now missing Quyen Tu Au — An Thanh Tran — caught red-handed.
Quyen Tu Au had been relatively close with An Thanh Tran’s brother An Man Tran and was known to stay at his house on occasion. In fact, Quyen had apparently left his home only days before his disappearance to stay with An, bringing a few of his belongings, including the stolen debit card, with him. The day prior to his disappearance, he’d even gone with one of these friends to buy himself a brand new car, an $18,000 Mitsubishi Verada.
However, the moment Quyen disappeared, his four acquaintances — An Man Tran, his brother An Thanh Tran, his wife Thanh Hua and his brother-in-law Mau Ung Hua — began acting strangely.
Three days after Quyen disappeared, Quyen’s new car’s registration was changed over to one of Quyen’s friends using a fraudulent signature and on the 1st of September, the car was traded in for a brand new Landcruiser. Police confirmed that these friends had been using the stolen card ever since Quyen’s disappearance, yet they doubted Quyen would have given it to them. Not to mention, not a single one of these ‘friends’ of Quyen’s thought to tell anyone that he’d completely vanished off the face of the earth for the past two months.
Police, originally considering Quyen to be a runaway, now had their suspicions. There was no record of Quyen leaving the country, purchasing or renting any vehicles, accessing or opening any bank accounts, or contacting any of his family. A majority of his belongings were still in his home and the money he stole, though substantial, would not have been enough to last him several years living out on his own without him having to make any further withdrawals. And above all, if he’d ran away, why wouldn’t he have taken the stolen card with him, and why would he have given it to four people Quyen was barely able to call ‘friends’? Police now had their sights set on only one theory: foul play.
In November of 2000, less than a month after the debit card was finally swallowed by an ATM, police searched 17 properties in Adelaide, South Australia, searching for the perpetrators and the stolen cash. And stolen cash is exactly what they got when searching a home in Kilburn, finding $4.07 million beneath the floorboards of the main bedroom. $1.8 million was still missing.
An Man Tran and the rest of his four-man team were promptly found and arrested. This, however, was far from the end.
Police immediately seized the car Quyen purchased the day before his disappearance, suspecting it may have been traded in as it had been used to dispose of Quyen’s body, but neither the Verada nor the Landcruiser provided answers.
In 2003, police got a tip from an anonymous person who told them the body of Quyen had been buried beneath the Kitchener Street home of An Man Tran — the same home that the $4.07 million was recovered. This peaked police interest. Tiles had been lain over the home’s floorboards in almost every room shortly after Quyen’s disappearance, leading to reasonable suspicion. However, after a six-hour forensic search of the home using probes and industrial equipment, all that was recovered were the bones of an animal. Quyen was still nowhere to be found.
Police believe Quyen was most likely murdered after refusing to give up the stolen credit card to his four acquaintances but how, when and where he was murdered is still unknown. Is his body still buried deep under the Kitchener home property, or had he been moved, possibly after the policed searched the house for the stolen cash? Had he been killed in the Kitchener home, the residents cleaning up the mess until it was spotless, or had he been taken somewhere for the sole intent of being murdered? To this day, the disappearance of Quyen Tu Au still remains a mystery, but police are close. Detective Inspector Greg Hutchins told ABC NEWS: “We believe this case is solvable — we only need one final piece of information from the right caller to finally fit the full jigsaw puzzle together”.
If you have any information about the disappearance of Quyen Tu Au, please contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or on their website: https://crimestopperssa.com.au/
A reward of $200,000 is available for any information that leads to the discovery of Quyen Tu Au’s remains, or the conviction of the person or persons responsible for his murder.
All resources used in this article are listed in the ‘Resources’ section of the orininal Article ‘What Happened to Quyen Tu Au’ on my website: https://codylwrites.com/2020/08/18/what-happened-to-quyen-tu-au/