A Chinese taxi driver returned 6,435 yuan (almost 950 US dollars) to an American visitor who wrongly overpaid for his ride using WeChat Pay. 

Zhang Peng, a taxi driver in Xi’an, the capital of China’s northwest Shaanxi Province, accidently noticed that one of his customers paid 6,500 yuan on Monday, when he was checking his wallet on WeChat Pay later in the day. 

Zhang was surprised and confused at first: “6,500 yuan is even more than the salary I earn for one month. Who paid this?” Based on the timestamp, Zhang recollected that there was a group of four people he picked up at the railway station and drove to a hotel, and realized it was probably them. 

Zhang firstly asked his taxi firm’s dispatchers whether they could help him to track down the group, but they could not. So Zhang drove to the hotel to see if the group was still staying there.

After explaining the situation to the reception desk, Zhang was able to find the group and return the money.

The passenger, whose surname is Liu, was surprised. As a reward, Liu told Zhang to give back only 6,300 yuan, but the taxi driver refused and insisted on returning the full amount. 

Instead, Liu sent Zhang a message in Chinese on WeChat, China’s popular instant messaging platform, to thank him. 

“I was really surprised and moved yesterday. When I saw you, I didn’t believe it is true. Money can be the only goal for some people. 6,500 yuan is not a big amount of money, but also not a small one. Actually, this kind of thing happened to me more than 20 years ago, when I lost my wallet in the car park. Thanks to a person with strong morals just like you, all my things were returned. You are not only doing something good to me, you are also contributing to the whole society!”

Liu was visiting Xi’an for the first time and was confused about how the mobile payment systems worked.  “WeChat Pay and Alipay are new things to me. I live with my family in US . When I make a payment in the US, there is always a space for decimal points. So I thought I should do the same thing in China. However it turns out I misunderstood!”

“I felt down when I came across the wrong payment. I didn’t think it would be such a wonderful ending!” Liu added.