Living in a big modern hub of creativity like Shenzhen does come at a price – and we don't only mean the soaring rent. Shenzhen Economic Daily reported on Thursday that city dwellers have been scammed out of RMB1 billion over the past three years.
According to a Shenzhen Daily report, the most popular types of scams included online credit card applications, fake shopping refunds, people posing as distant relatives or friends of friends asking for money, people pretending to be bosses to order money transfers and shady websites.
Anyone who feels they have been the victim of fraud are advised to call the Shenzhen Municipal Public Security Bureau Anti-Fraud Center at 8123-4567 to report the case. The Anti-Fraud Center stated that it had received an astounding 746,000 calls last year.
In the past three years, the number of people in Shenzhen who have reported a scam has exceeded 12,000 (what the 746,000 calls were about last year we simply don’t know…wrong number?), according to Shenzhen Daily.
The web appears to have become one of the most popular dwellings for scammers with statistics showing “websites created to look like official websites” made up 10.5 percent of the city’s fraud cases over the past three years. In the standard scenario, users would be asked to create an account on the website first and then encouraged to make purchases to increase their on-site credit.
The next four categories on the ‘popular scam’ list included credit card scams (9.8 percent), shopping refund scams (7.6 percent), fake relative scams (6.1 percent) and fake boss scams (4.4 percent).
The number of telecom scams has also increased over the past ten years, according to the report. In 2015, the mainland became a victim of up to 590,000 telecom scams totaling at a whopping RMB22.2 billion.
[Image via www.digitaltrends.com]
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