London: Termites got into a Taiwanese woman’s safe and munched their way through 32,700 pounds in cash that she saved to study abroad, it was reported here.

She turned to Taiwan’s Investigation Bureau to help her exchange her bundles of damaged notes for new ones. However, the bureau’s forensic unit only managed to piece together a quarter of the notes from the piles of shredded paper, the Daily Mail reported Thursday.

The woman, identified only by her surname Chen, had graduated from a Taipei university last year. It took her eight years of hard work to come up with the money.

This April, Chen found that termites had eaten most of the piles of cash at a safe in her house.

The bureau urged people to put their money in banks to avoid similar incidents from happening again.