(ECNS) -- China is rife with telecom fraud, with criminals carrying out a successful or nearly successful scam every 5.4 days on average so far this year, Beijing News reported on Friday, citing a new study.
Media reports show that China's telecom scams have increased at an annual rate of 20 to 30 percent in the past ten years, said the report released by a mobile phone anti-harassment and anti-fraud alliance during its 2016 summit on Thursday, as part of the effort to help the country's fight against telecom scams.
Last year, China's public security authorities registered 590,000 telecom scam cases, up 32.5 percent from 2014, resulting in economic losses worth 22.2 billion yuan ($3.3 billion), it said.
In the third quarter of 2016 alone, 360 Security, a popular security app for smartphones, recognized and blocked 11.54 billion harassing calls for users across China, a daily average of 130 million, among which 13.3 percent were scams, or a daily average of 16.68 million, the paper said.
The success rate of scam calls was about 0.1 percent, meaning one out of every 1,000 scam calls (either placed or answered by criminals) would be a near-success, while scam calls placed on mobile phones saw the highest success rate, at 0.28 percent, which translated into one near-success out of every 357 fraudulent calls, the paper reported.
According to statistics from 360 Security, if a user answered a scam call for more than 30 minutes, it was highly possible that the criminal would succeed in the fraud attempt.
Data also show that 68.8 percent of scam calls by criminals were from a different city than where their targeted victims were located, the paper said. Experts from 360 warned users to pay close attention to the accents of strangers when answering phone calls.
Financial scam calls occurred most frequently in Shanxi, Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang and Guangdong, while telecom fraud under the cover of false identity was most commonly seen in Fujian, Jiangsu, Henan, Liaoning and Sichuan, according to the study.
Gu Yuhui, an official from Shenzhen's center for fighting telecom and Internet fraud, said it was very difficult to collect evidence during investigations into telecom fraud cases. Telecom and Internet fraud took up nearly one-fourth of the city's total criminal cases, but public security authorities were unable to assign one-fourth of its police officers to cope with them.
Through cooperation with the mobile phone anti-harassment and anti-fraud alliance, the center effectively curbed the expansion of harassment messages and scams, making more people aware of the danger of harassment messages and fraud activities, Gu said.
The number of telecom scams in Shenzhen fell 25.3 percent so far this year from the same period of last year, and the number of cases that entered into the criminal procedure dropped 17.2 percent year-on-year.
Pei Zhiyong, an anti-fraud expert, also said it was necessary to conduct further research into telecom fraud activities.
