Binyang. (File photo/China News Service)
Binyang in South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region is a county known nationwide for its "fire dragon dance" cultural festival. But it has now become even better known for cyber fraud. From individual families to whole villages, Binyang is rife with professional, and organized scams, swindling money through online messaging services. This easy path to a quick buck has become popular among the village's young people, even among teenagers.
Binyang, a county of about 1 million people located 70 kilometers outside Nanning, the capital city of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in South China, has become notorious for cyber swindling, as police have recorded increasing numbers of cyber fraud cases.
As one major source of telecommunication fraud identified by the Ministry of Public Security, Binyang has become a home to swindlers who commit Internet and telephone fraud, especially via QQ, China's most popular instant messenger service.
Most people involved in the cases are young people in their 20s and 30s. The youngest suspect detained was only 13. From 2009 to October 2014, Binyang police assisted in cracking 2,200 fraud cases, detained 1,050 suspects, and recovered more than 10 million yuan ($1.61 million) from criminals, Nanning Evening News reported.
On April 2, the county government held a meeting to mobilize township officials and law enforcement officials, telling them to spare no efforts to crack down on cyber fraud so as to burnish the county's image.
"QQ fraud has seriously damaged Binyang's image and interests," the county's Party chief Zhang Xianjin remarked at the meeting, according to the Binyang Today newspaper. All townships and units shall be resolute, "braving a broken wrist to scrape the poison off the bone" in the fight against the wave of cyber scams, Zhang vowed.
Easy money
Since 2012, cracking down on QQ fraud has become a key task for the Binyang government, one which it covers each year in its work report for the previous year.
In 2008, QQ swindling tactics began to spread through villages in Binyang. Soon, being taught and passed on by word of mouth, the scams spread like a virus. Earning money by "playing with QQ" became an open secret in the county. The people engaged in the fraud are called "Q kids."
There are two versions for the origins of the county's fraud skills. One is that they were transmitted from Fujian Province. The other is someone learned them in Guangdong Province and brought them back to Binyang.
"At the peak, at least half [of the county's] young people were involved in cyber fraud," a former Q kid born in the 1980s told the Shanghai Morning Post in June last year. "There was a widespread rumor here that in one week, as much as 100 million yuan [in swindled money] was transferred to Binyang."
At the beginning, the fraud involved sending Trojan horses to other QQ users, stealing their QQ accounts, and using the hijacked accounts to trick users' friends into paying to charge the users' mobile phones (phone credit can be exchanged for currency in some circumstances).
In 2010, the skills began to evolve.
Q kids began to record a streaming video message of the users, then stealing their QQ accounts. The swindler would then log onto the QQ account, chat with other active users, play the video to boost their credibility, and ask the other user to lend money through credit cards.
In 2013, scams began to target QQ users who are parents of children studying overseas. Swindlers sent messages saying the children urgently required money for surgery or tuition. The amount stolen in each case of fraud ranged from tens of thousands of yuan to hundreds of thousands of yuan.
Starting 2014, a more complicated form of fraud targeting company finance staff emerged, according to a Southern Weekly report. Suspects first joined a finance staff chat group, observing and getting to know the identities of the people in the group. The suspects then stole accounts by planting viruses in the chat. After that the swindler would fake an account as a company's head asking finance staff to remit money to a bank account.
In one such instance, a company in Suihua, Heilongjiang Province, was cheated of 12 million yuan last August. The crime was traced to a fraud ring in Binyang. Four suspects were detained, with one still at large.
