A US Appeals Court has 'trashed' a New York district court judge's US$1.3 billion penalty levied against Bank of America over a financial crisis-era mortgage program, noting that not enough evidence was produced to show the "contemporaneous fraudulent intent necessary to prove a scheme to defraud through contractual promises," according to US legal news website Law360. In brief, the US Government had alleged, based on information provided by a whistleblower, that Countrywide sold nearly 30,000 low-quality loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2007 and 2008, pushing through "large numbers of toxic loans in a bid to boost revenues while leaving the mortgage entities saddled with bad debt." A total of Yen1.4 billion (approximately A$15 million) has been stolen from cash machines in Japan in a co-ordinated two-hour raid by 100 people using cloned bank cards, according to tech website Finextra. The culprits used the cards to make approximately 14,000 transactions, each totalling YEN 100,000 from cash machines located in convenience stores across the country in the early hours of Sunday morning. ATM transaction data suggests that the theft involved up to 1600 cloned cards obtained from an unidentified bank in South Africa. Japanese police say they are working with authorities in South Africa to investigate the crime.