China's Major Financial Event of 2020: The Oil Treasure Scam - Bank of China's 60k Retail Investors Lost 5.6 Billion!

In 2020, the global pandemic led to full lockdowns worldwide, causing a direct collapse in oil demand. The Cushing oil storage in the U.S. was completely filled, and holding physical oil actually meant paying exorbitant storage fees, exposing the market to extreme risks.

Even more suspicious, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) changed its rules in advance, openly allowing crude oil futures prices to go negative, effectively opening Pandora's box ahead of the crash.

At that time, major domestic banks had already become alert. ICBC and CCB completed their contract rollovers a week early, perfectly avoiding the deadly window before delivery and fully hedging risks.

Only Bank of China's Oil Treasure stubbornly delayed the rollover until the last delivery day, rigidly closing the domestic trading channels at 10 PM every night, directly locking in all investors' stop-loss and liquidation operations, exposing retail investors' funds to an unprepared hunting ground.

Meanwhile, London-based Vega Capital had already identified all loopholes: saturated storage, negative price rules, Bank of China's latest rollover cut-off, and early closure of retail trading channels.

They precisely timed the delivery settlement window to half an hour, aggressively dumped massive short positions to manipulate the market, and forcibly drove WTI May contracts from positive prices down to -$37.63 per barrel. Through this unprecedented extreme operation, they made a staggering $660 million profit and exited unscathed.

Domestic retail investors who bought into the Oil Treasure thought it was a stable financial product backed by the bank, unaware of the risks of futures delivery and rollover.

When they woke up, all their principal was wiped out, and due to negative settlement, they faced margin calls, owing banks tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of yuan. Countless families were bankrupted overnight.

The aftermath was settled: investors' margin debts were waived, but only 20% of their principal losses were compensated, with the remaining 80% to be borne by themselves. The Bank of China was fined 50.5 million yuan by regulators, with accountability for senior executives and comprehensive business rectification.

Relying on the huge profits from this hunting trap, Vega Capital had already pocketed the gains and faced no further accountability.

Every step of this incident was interconnected, hitting critical points precisely. Was this merely Bank of China's risk control negligence and arrogance, or was it a premeditated cross-border predatory scheme? $XTI