Rich pickings
Last year, a series of telecom frauds nationwide netted 22.2 billion yuan. Half the money flowed into bank accounts in Taiwan, and so far only a fraction of the total amount has been recovered, leaving many families destitute.
Even financial professionals are not immune to the fraudsters' ploys, which have resulted in large losses of government funds.
In April, police in Guizhou province broke up China's biggest single case of telecom fraud, in which 117 million yuan of public money was taken from the construction bureau of the Economic Development Zone in Duyun city.
The bureau's finance supervisor, surnamed Yang, was contacted by several callers who claimed either to be officers at a police station in the Songjiang district of Shanghai or staff at the headquarters of the Agricultural Bank of China. Yang was told the bank account she managed needed to be reviewed, and she was instructed to download software from a website that would provide the callers with access to the bureau's finances.
Fake calls such as these are not a novelty, but many people remain ignorant about the serious consequences of revealing information to unidentified callers.
Overseas operations
Nearly 600,000 similar cases were cracked in China last year, but the problem is becoming more widespread. "The number of similar crimes has continued to rise since the beginning of this year," said Chen Shiqu, a deputy inspect or at the criminal investigation bureau at the Public Security Ministry.
According to Chen, a mere 200,000 yuan has been recovered in recent years. In most of the frauds, criminals from Taiwan set up bases in countries such as Malaysia, Uganda and Turkey and then hired mainlanders to play different roles in the deception.
Unlike the duplicitous methods employed by criminals in recent years, such as calling people and asking them to provide details that allow them to claim a "prize" in a false lottery, the procedure has become more complex and usually begins with a phone call: "The police department wishes to inform you that your bank account has been compromised. An officer will contact you shortly to assist you in freezing your account."
Initially, neither Fan nor Yang believed the phone calls, but when a check with the national registry system showed the numbers matched those of genuine police stations, they were convinced of their authenticity. Following the phone call, Fan was sent a document, purportedly from the top procuratorate, that showed his bank account had been frozen. The document included detailed information, including Fan's ID number, which added more credence to the story.
Likewise, Yang received a criminal investigation warrant and a freezing order, both of which carried red government stamps. The documents played crucial roles in convincing Fan and Yang of the authenticity of the calls, and they quickly began to worry about the money they had placed in banks.
Zhou Haihong, one of the officers in charge of Yang's case, said the police recovered the numbers of calls made to Yang's cellphone and traced them to automatic-dialing software on a computer server in Uganda, where the fraudsters were based.
After the software changed the caller ID, Yang's phone displayed a number selected by the swindlers.
The same server has been linked to bogus phone calls to other victims, including two people in Zhejiang province, who were swindled out of a combined 2.7 million yuan in January.
Police discovered that the gang was well-organized. One of the masterminds, surnamed Chen, from Taiwan rented computer servers from a mainland company and hired operators from the mainland, who were contracted on a basic wage, received bonuses on profits and received training before being sent overseas.
The police also detained dealers who sold private information to the gang. Officers recovered nearly 200 ID cards, 43 bank cards and disks containing personal information related to 155,000 senior managers of financial institutions and government employees. Personal driver details were also stolen from traffic bureaus.
In April, 62 alleged members of the ring that had been operating in Uganda, including 10 from Taiwan, were brought back to the Chinese mainland. The gang, which is alleged to have been involved in more than 180 cases targeting Chinese nationals in 26 provinces, is still being investigated.
In March, police from Malaysia and the Chinese mainland cooperated in an investigation into five cases of international telecom fraud. They arrested 117 suspects, 65 from the mainland and 52 from Taiwan. Twenty Taiwan residents were handed over to Taiwan authorities by Malaysian police on April 15, while the others were repatriated to the mainland at the end of April.
Also in April, Kenyan police deported 77 suspected telecom fraudsters, including 45 from Taiwan, from two other syndicates to the Chinese mainland. On May 31, 82 suspects, including 52 from Taiwan, were arrested in Izmir in western Turkey on fraud charges.
