40 arrested in bank fraud crackdown

Police have arrested 40 suspects and recovered more than 16 million yuan ($2.55 million) stolen through bank fraud since February, law enforcement officials said at a press conference Tuesday.

Criminal organizations that engage in bank card fraud have been increasingly conducting their scams entirely online, said Dai Xinfu, vice chief of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau's Economic Crime Investigation Department.

In the past, criminals needed to get their hands on a victim's bank card to access his or her account, Dai said. However, more recently, they have been able to empty bank accounts without ever touching a card.

In one case, a local man, who was not identified, had 1.5 million yuan stolen from his bank account even though his card had never been compromised.

The suspects, surnamed Ning and Zhang, were able to hack the victim's online bank account by cracking its passwords, which officials pointed out were far too simple.

From the account, they gained access to the victim's personal information, which they used to create a phony State identification card that featured a photo of one of the suspects.

Ning and Zhang used the counterfeit ID card to open a new bank account under the victim's name.

They then transferred the money from the victim's bank account to an online wealth management platform, where they bought into an investment fund. Within 10 minutes, they sold the fund and transferred all of the money into the new account they had opened with the phony ID.

Investigators spent two months tracing the money. They arrested the two suspects separately in Hunan and Jiangxi provinces and recovered 500,000 yuan of the stolen money.

Police ordered the wealth management platform to bar users from moving money in and out of the platform from different bank accounts.

Senior Detective Wang Xin warned residents to take good care of the information printed on their bank cards, including account numbers, expiration dates, CVV2 codes and card holder names because police recently busted another criminal gang that raided bank accounts after gathering that information.

The gang's members posed as bank employees who offered to help increase the victims' credit limits. They asked the card holders for their information on the card.

Then the ring worked with an airline ticket agency that booked airline tickets to launder the money.

Dai said that bank card fraud rings tend to spend the money online to avoid exposing themselves in the real world. Usually, they spend the money in large department stores.