Con artists nabbed for preying on family ties

Police have arrested a group of short con artists for scamming 15,000 yuan ($2,462) from several senior citizens by pretending to be their distant relatives, local media reported.

Huangpu district police have detained six suspects for swindling four residents since September, according to a report Saturday on the news website jfdaily.com. Police said the suspects targeted seniors in parks, subway station entrances and other places where elderly residents like to hang out.

The swindlers' goal was to convince their targets that they were related so they could ask them for money, the report said.

In a typical case, a man who appeared to be in his 40s approached a local resident surnamed Zhang in October while he was taking a walk in a park. The stranger asked Zhang about his hometown and whether he still had family there. Zhang said that he might have two distant relatives in northern Jiangsu province. The stranger acted surprised and exclaimed that he was Zhang's nephew.

The stranger then called a supposed relative in Jiangsu, telling him that he had found a long-lost family member in Shanghai. The stranger put Zhang on the phone with the relative, who had a strong northern Jiangsu accent.

Although Zhang didn't recognize either man, he believed what they told him because 20 years had passed since he had last been to northern Jiangsu. He invited the stranger to his home, where the younger man told Zhang that he was in Shanghai on a business trip and his car had broken down. He asked Zhang to borrow 3,000 yuan to get it fixed. Zhang agreed to loan him the money, but the stranger never returned to repay him.

Police said that they worked on the case for more than a month before they arrested the group of con artists.