Sri Lankan police arrest 100 Chinese nationals

Police in Sri Lanka arrested 100 Chinese nationals who were involved in telephone fraud in China following a complaint lodged by the Chinese police, a police spokesman said Saturday.

Police Spokesman Priyashantha Jayakody told Xinhua that the arrests were made with the assistance of officials from the Chinese police in the country. "The Chinese police sought our help to arrest these people. We got a court order on Friday and arrested them after we identified where they were staying. They were arrested for crimes committed in China and not in Sri Lanka,"the police spokesman said.

He added that the Chinese nationals were arrested in the capital and its immediate suburbs after obtaining the court order.

In May this year, the police arrested 17 Chinese nationals in Rajagiriya, a suburb of Colombo, over similar charges and they were then deported back to China.

Those arrested were connected to a network of people from different countries who had been involved in telephone fraud.

The 17 arrested were part of over 400 Chinese arrested from several countries over a transnational telephone fraud.

Telephone fraud has become a major social security problem in the Chinese mainland. Suspects often use overseas servers to make phone calls from overseas, making it more difficult for mainland police to trace them.

Chinese police said that the swindlers frequently change their crime methods and shift their fraud dens to avoid the police, and the fraud shelters have been spreading to countries in South Asia and Oceania rather than traditional destinations such as Chinese mainland, China's Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia and Cambodia.