Base station-equipped telecom-fraud gangs busted

Chinese police, in a recent cross-provincial raid, have busted 72 gangs involved in a new type of telecom fraud facilitated by illicit base stations, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) said on Monday.

During the raid, the police captured 217 criminal suspects, destroyed four dens in which illicit base stations were produced and confiscated 96 sets of such equipment.

The raid hit locations in provinces and cities including Liaoning, Hunan, Guangdong and Beijing on dates that were not specified by police.

In these cases, gangsters used forged base stations to intercept SIM card information and send duping or commercial text messages to these intercepted phone numbers.

A base station, a piece of wireless transmitting equipment usually composed of a main unit and a laptop, can acquire SIM card information from mobile phones within a certain range. Duping or commercial text messages can then be sent to the intercepted numbers.

The victimized mobile phones will be disconnected from the public telecom network and lose signals for a period of time.

Duping messages are usually randomly sent to a great number of users, attempting to fool them to transfer money to a designated bank account. Or swindlers may pretend to be someone whose mobile phone-related information they have intercepted, and cheat their families and friends out of money.

A fraud gang with a leader surnamed He, landed over one million yuan (163,300 U.S.dollars) of cash in three months through such channels, according to police.

Li Xiong, a police officer in Loudi City of Hunan Province, said, "Although their success rate was quite low, this gang managed to rake in thousands of yuan each day given the gigantic number of duping messages they sent."

Li said He's gang bought four illicit base stations, and conducted crimes in Hunan and Guangdong provinces. Each day, they sent over 100,000 duping messages from base station-carrying vehicles to nearby victims in densely-populated areas.

By using illicit base stations, instead of SIM cards, to send duping messages, the swindlers also saved costs and dodged telecom operators' monitoring, according to the confess by a suspect surnamed Tan.

The MPS said that this category of crime has emerged through a number of tip-offs since the start of this year.

It added that, should this equipment fall into the hands of ill-intentioned groups or individuals, they may use them to spread rumors in the name of authorities, generating a grave social impact.

The ministry vowed to maintain a tough stance against such types of crime.