We asked you to solve cases, and here you are sharing your criminal experiences?

The only sound in the major crimes unit's large office was the crisp sound of keyboards being tapped.

Old Zheng led the Economic Crime Investigation Team out of the city police station like a whirlwind, heading straight for the headquarters of the Xinghai Charity Foundation. The remaining mess fell entirely on Song Qianxia and the technical department.

Song Qianxia sat cross-legged on the swivel chair. She ignored the mountain of paper copies and directly opened the electronic transaction record she had just intercepted.

Gu Tingchen stood behind her, holding a freshly poured cup of black coffee. He didn't disturb her, but simply stared at the rapidly scrolling lines of code on the screen.

"What we just found out was only the channel through which the funds left the country," Song Qianxia said, typing on her keyboard while chewing on potato chips. "What we need to investigate now is under what name these funds were transferred out."

She downloaded the Xinghai Foundation's annual audit report, which was published on its official website. The report was beautifully presented and filled with touching photos of children in mountain villages holding their new schoolbags.

"Look here." Song Qianxia circled the appendix at the end of the report with her mouse. "The Warm Sunshine Education Assistance Program has funded 27 primary schools in remote mountainous areas over the past three years. On paper, every penny has been clearly transferred to these 27 corporate accounts."

Gu Tingchen glanced at the long list of schools, a flicker of wariness in his eyes. "Is there a problem?"

"There's something very wrong with this." Song Qianxia's fingers flew across the keyboard. "This kind of publicly available financial report can only fool laymen. Because donors simply won't bother to verify whether these twenty-seven schools actually exist."

She wrote a small web crawler script that bypassed basic firewalls and connected to the national education system's publicly available registration database.

"Comparison begins. Enter the names and operating license numbers of these twenty-seven schools into the system and run them through once." Song Qianxia pressed the Enter key.

A progress bar appeared on the screen. In less than thirty seconds, the comparison results popped up.

Nine red error messages suddenly appeared in the otherwise neat and uniform green list.

Song Qianxia extracted the nine highlighted messages and enlarged them to display in the center of the screen. "No such school found."

Lin Wan happened to be carrying a stack of documents when she walked over. After seeing the words on the screen, her eyes widened in surprise.

"What do you mean? These primary schools are fake?" Lin Wan couldn't believe her eyes. "But the report clearly has a receipt and an official stamp!"

"It's just a radish seal. You can get three carved for fifty yuan under the overpass," Song Qianxia said, pursing her lips.

She turned to look at Gu Tingchen, her tone becoming professional.

"In underground financial networks, this is called a shadow beneficiary structure," Song Qianxia pointed to the screen. "They use real impoverished primary schools as a cover, mixing these nine fake schools that don't even exist into the list."

"Once the money is deposited into the accounts of these nine fake schools, it will be immediately divided into hundreds of small amounts within three minutes and flow into the duty-free port of Cyrillic State through cryptocurrencies or shell companies."

Gu Tingchen's face turned cold. These people weren't just laundering money; they were consuming the goodwill of society. Every penny that was laundered should have been going to children in mountain villages.

Just then, the landline on the office desk started ringing frantically.

Lin Wan answered the phone, listened for a couple of sentences, and her expression changed. She covered the receiver and looked at Gu Tingchen.

"Captain Gu, it's Captain Zheng calling. He's very angry and says he wants to report to you personally."

Gu Tingchen walked over, took the phone, and pressed the speakerphone button.

Old Zheng's irritable voice immediately echoed throughout the entire office.

"Captain Gu! Those bastards were prepared!" Old Zheng panted heavily on the other end of the phone. "We led our men into the Xinghai Foundation, and their vice president personally came out to greet us. He was incredibly polite, even serving us tea and water."

"Get to the point." Gu Tingchen's brows furrowed into a knot.

"We went with a search warrant to retrieve the original vouchers and payment slips from those three years," Old Zheng said, cursing. "But the people in their finance department produced a document saying that all the vouchers from those years had been destroyed!"

Song Qianxia, ​​who was listening nearby, almost crushed the potato chips in her hand.

Destroyed? Those were tens of millions of dollars worth of accounts, just vanished like that?

"What's the reason for the destruction?" Gu Tingchen asked calmly.

"Compliant destruction!" Old Zheng gritted his teeth in anger. "According to the Accounting Law, the retention period for general accounting vouchers is between ten and thirty years. But they exploited a loophole and classified those accounts involving cross-border purchases as 'monthly temporary working capital vouchers,' with a retention period of only three years."

Old Zheng flipped through the papers on the other end of the phone.

"The destruction list they produced had all the necessary procedures and a perfect process. It had the signature of their internal auditor and the stamp of a third-party accounting firm. They even provided us with the surveillance video of the paper being sent to the shredder!"

Flawless. This was a perfectly legitimate cover-up.

As expected, the Night Owls never leave such low-level clues. They manipulate the rules with ease.

"Who initiated the destruction list?" Gu Tingchen asked, getting straight to the point.

Such large-scale destruction of accounts requires a clearly identified initiator. The higher-ups won't take the blame themselves.

Old Zheng was silent for two seconds on the other end, seemingly checking the name.

"It's a woman named Meng Xiaoqing. Her job is cashier in the finance department of the Xinghai Foundation."

Song Qianxia didn't waste a single second. The moment she heard the name, her fingers flew across the keyboard.

She simultaneously accessed the household registration and social security systems on the city bureau's intranet.

Two minutes later, a detailed personal file appeared on Song Qianxia's computer screen.

"Meng Xiaoqing, female, 24 years old. A local of Jiangcheng, she graduated from an ordinary second-tier university specializing in finance. She has been working at the Xinghai Foundation for less than two years."

Song Qianxia looked at the ID photo on the screen. The girl in the photo had bangs, smiled shyly, and had a clear, innocent look in her eyes.

"A monthly salary of five thousand five hundred yuan." Song Qianxia sneered, pointing to the social security contribution base, "A recent graduate, a low-level cashier earning five thousand five hundred yuan a month. What qualifications or audacity does she have to voluntarily apply to destroy core vouchers for tens of millions of yuan in transaction records?"

Lin Wan gasped. "She's a scapegoat."

Gu Tingchen immediately gave instructions over the phone.

"Old Zheng, bring that vice president and the finance director back to the station for separate questioning. Focus on Meng Xiaoqing's whereabouts; I'm taking men to arrest her right now!"

"Captain Gu, it's too late." Old Zheng's voice sounded somewhat helpless. "I just asked the finance manager. He said Meng Xiaoqing took sick leave the day before yesterday. She hasn't come to work these past few days, and we can't even get through to her on the phone."

The air in the office instantly dropped to freezing point.

Unable to reach by phone, and not at work. His disappearance at this critical juncture is definitely not a coincidence.

Song Qianxia stared at the girl's ID photo on the screen. She was all too familiar with the way the underground cleaners operated. Once it came to the point where the ledgers needed to be "compliantly destroyed," it meant that the person who created the ledgers also had no reason to live.

Living people are more likely to leak information than paper documents.

Gu Tingchen hung up the phone and strode to his desk to get his car keys.

"Lin Wan, notify the video surveillance department to retrieve all surveillance footage from the vicinity of Meng Xiaoqing's residence for the past three days." Gu Tingchen spoke rapidly, "Check her high-speed rail, flight, and accommodation records."