47 telescam suspects back from Indonesia
Print Edition
FORTY-SEVEN suspects based in Indonesia who were allegedly involved in multiple telecom scams targeting Chinese citizens were caught and brought back to Shanghai by city police yesterday.
They were among a total of 254 suspects from the Chinese mainland involved in telescam cases who were brought back home from Indonesia and Cambodia on four flights to Beijing, Hangzhou, Guangzhou and Shanghai yesterday.
Local police said that more than 45,000 scam calls, most originating from Indonesia, have been reported since July this year, with 453 Shanghai residents falling victim.
Since a campaign targeting new types of telecom crime was launched in China last month, law enforcers have vowed to step up crackdown on telescammers, who increasingly call from overseas to elude home police.
The 47 suspects were caught from various locations in Surabaya and Cirebon in raids which took place on October 19 and 20 after the Ministry of Public Security got an intelligence tip in late September that a few telescam dens which dialed Chinese phone numbers were discovered in Indonesia.
A total of 224 suspects — 86 from the mainland and 138 Taiwan residents — were nabbed during the raids carried out by police from the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Indonesia, at eight locations.
On October 31, police from the mainland and Cambodia destroyed three scam dens, captured 168 suspects, and seized a number of computers, mobile phones and bank cards which had been used to commit the alleged offenses.
“It was a devastating blow,” Wei Jian, deputy chief of the criminal investigation team of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau, said of the Indonesia raids. “It’s almost safe to say that Indonesia has been cleared of Chinese telescammers now,” added Wei who is an expert in cracking down on telescams.
In one of the scams reported by some local residents in July, a gang in Indonesia illegally seized customer information from shangpin.com, a shopping site for fashion ware. Feigning to be customer service, they informed users that their personal accounts had been mistakenly configured as wholesale business accounts from which 500 yuan (US$78) was deducted every month.
The customers were told that customer service of China Merchants Bank will help them settle the deduction. Then the scammers made fake calls, claiming to be from the bank, tricking the customers to transfer money to the gang’s accounts via fake online banking sites.
Police said they are still investigating the case though it brings little solace to locals who have suffered big monetary loss in the scam.
The 47 suspects brought back to Shanghai are from central and southern Chinese provinces of Hunan, Guangdong, Fujian and the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. They were recruited by domestic ringleaders to work in telescam gangs based in Indonesia, usually on three-month business visas, police said.
“Their passports were confiscated by the ringleaders, and they knew each other only by nicknames because they were not allowed to communicate with each other,” Wei said. “They were also prevented from leaving their residence alone which was in the same complex as their work place.”
Wei said police found boxes and boxes of throat drops from a telescam den as well as some digital voice recorders which helped the scammers on the phone improve their skills of persuasion under guidance from ringleaders.
Shanghai police said they had cracked 3,922 telescam cases in the first nine months this year, 57.4 percent more than in the same period last year. Money and objects worth about 30 million yuan were recovered, a 53.5 percent rise.
One-third of the scam calls were from out of China and most of the callers pretended to be public servants and customer service of well-known shopping sites or banks, while monetary booty of scammers based in foreign countries accounted for about 60 percent of the total, according to police.
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