72 gangs involved in telecom fraud busted after police raids
Print Edition
Chinese police, during a recent cross-provincial raid, have busted 72 gangs involved in a new type of telecom fraud facilitated by illicit base stations, the Ministry of Public Security said yesterday.
During the raid, police captured 217 criminal suspects, destroyed four dens in which illicit base stations were produced and confiscated 96 sets of such equipment.
The raid were carried out in provinces and cities including Liaoning, Hunan, Guangdong and Beijing. Gangsters used forged base stations to intercept SIM card information and send duping or commercial text messages to these intercepted phone numbers.
A base station, a piece of wireless transmitting equipment usually composed of a main unit and a laptop, can acquire SIM card information from mobile phones within a certain range. Duping or commercial text messages can then be sent to the intercepted numbers.
The mobile phones are then disconnected from the public telecom network and lose signals for a period of time.
Duping messages are usually randomly sent to a great number of users, attempting to fool them to transfer money to a designated bank account. Or swindlers may pretend to be someone whose mobile phone-related information they have intercepted, and cheat their families and friends out of money.
A gang leader, surnamed He, pocketed over one million yuan (US$163,300) of cash in three months through such channels, police said.
Li Xiong, a police officer in Loudi City of Hunan Province, said, “Although their success rate was quite low, this gang managed to rake in thousands of yuan each day given the gigantic number of duping messages they sent.”
Li said He’s gang bought four illicit base stations, and conducted crimes in Hunan and Guangdong provinces. Each day, they sent over 100,000 fraudulent messages to people.
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