Hair salon scams patron out of 50,000 yuan
Print Edition
A man who went to a hair salon for a simple trim felt like he had been scalped when the barber scammed him out of 50,000 yuan (US$7,670) for what he expected to be a 68-yuan service.
The patron, surnamed Yang, complained to the local market supervision authority, which fined the hair salon 500,000 yuan and suspended its license for a week, officials said yesterday.
In February, Yang went to the Yijiang Road branch of the Zhenxuan Hair Salon chain in Pudong’s Zhangjiang Town for a haircut that should have cost 68 yuan. However, it ended up costing considerably more after the barber persuaded him to try a special hair-care product from South Korea costing 368 yuan per tube.
What the barber didn’t tell him was that he was using 14 tubes, bringing the price of the haircut up to a whopping 5,220 yuan, according to Liu Wei, an official with the Pudong New Area Market Supervision Administration.
But it didn’t stop there. After Yang questioned the price, the chief barber managed to persuade him to buy a prepaid card allowing him to take advantage of membership discounts. Yang paid 50,408 yuan for the card, but then called police after realising he had been duped. “We were astonished to hear of a case in which so much money was involved,” Liu told the Shanghai Morning Post.
He said the administration had received 29 similar complaints from customers about the branch since early last year, but the amounts were not as large and officials were unable to prove wrongdoing.
However, the sheer audacity displayed by the branch in Yang’s case prompted the administration to put together an investigation team to interview victims on March 21.
The case has been handed over to the Pudong police and those involved could face criminal charges after officers investigate, he told the newspaper.
The head of the branch claimed several barbers had hatched schemes to make quick money because they were addicted to gambling, according to the branch manager, who told the administration that she was on pregnancy leave when Yang was cheated, Liu said.
The parent company, Zhenxuan Hair Salon, will fine the branch 30,000 yuan to “teach them a lesson,” said Huang Xuezhen, the chain’s director.
“I would like to thank the administration, otherwise I would not know about such scandals,” he told the newspaper, assuring customers that “they will not dare to do that in future.”
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