How Chinese scam each other

[Xiao Kui]

I've been reading the Beijing teahouse scam thread abt the scams that get pulled on foreigners in China, and it reminded me of the scams that Chinese pull on each other, that we as laowai never experience.

Once, a few years ago, the police station in Chengdu propped up a little exhibition on Renmin Nan Lu. Featured were various propaganda cartoons warning people abt various scams. There were a ton of them featuring various scenarios, even a one with a madame trying to recruit a girl into prostitution. I regret that I wasn't able to read them all, but my Chinese reading was pretty slow at the time so I only could plod through 5-6 of them before Chinese people started staring at me for reading Chinese as a foreigner. What amazed me abt the scenarios were the number of creative scams involving a cell phone

I wish I could remember them, but two that come to mind are:

1. Scammer pretends to be buying and selling stocks, or making an investment, talking to his broker on the phone. Victim overhears the conversation and wants to get in on the deal

2. Scammer pretends to receive extremely sad news in a phone conversation. From the conversation, the victim can tell that the scammer has a close relation in a far away city that has been hospitalized and needs an expensive operation. Scammer cries. Victim offers to help

The beauty of these scams is that you don't even need a working cell phone to do it - just pretend to talk on the phone. Of course these scams don't work with most foreigners because we don't understand Chinese. Has anyone heard of any other cell phone scams, or scams that Chinese like to use on each other?

[roddy]

SMS scams are very common - there were signs up by ATMs recently warning about one where scammers bulk sent SMSs saying 'This is the Bank of China, your account has been compromised. Please phone 43214321321.'

If anyone phoned, they were told to go to an ATM, put in their card and PIN, and then given instructions on how to transfer the money out of their 'compromised' account into a 'new, safe, friendly' account that had been set up for them. I think you can guess the rest.

Purveyors of miracle cures and dodgy doctors are also an issue. Job offers like there are also apparently a quick way into a career in prostitution.

[heifeng]

I saw another scam on tv where students were asked to fill out surveys which gave information about their homes (phone #, parents profession, address...etc)

Then one of the student's mother received a call that her son was kidnapped and she would have to deposit xxx yuan into an account. It turns out the boy wasn't kidnapped but the mother was scared to death. Luckily she remained calm and didn't give up the cash, but in other cases people just don't think and go ahead and transfer the money....

There are also about a billion and one text message scams....

Lastly, not so much a scam, but have you heard about all the adding of color dye to produce and that "mystery" spray vendors spray on lychee has something like a ph of 1 so that it turns the lychee bright red but will probably cause various levels of destruction to your digestive system ( I saw this on TV last night...I am never eating bright red lychee again. Furthermore, I pledge from today forward to only eat the nastiest colored fruit with insect bites because it's probably the 'safest' and not sprayed, dyed, or covered excessively with pesticides...)

[Mugi]

Then one of the student's mother received a call that her son was kidnapped and she would have to deposit xxx yuan into an account.

This is similar to a scam that was popular here in Japan for a couple of years - the "ore, ore / It's me, it's me" scam (ore 俺 = me). Some mother back in a kid's hometown would get a call from her "son" who would be very upset after having been in a "traffic accident" that he caused. Without insurance, he would need excessive amounts of cash immediately. This phone call would often be followed by another from the "lawyer" for the "victim" or even a "police officer" from the "local station" to try and legitimize the first call.

The amazing thing is that even with this sort of scam being exposed in all forms of mass media nationwide on a weekly basis for a couple of years, every two or three weeks you would read another story of some 50 year old parent being conned out of thousands of dollars through this exact same scam!

Probably wouldn't work as well in China given all the different languages, dialects and accents.

[amo]

Populare cellphone scam.

You receive ONE ring and then you have a lost call. You call back and it cost you 100 yuan. So my advice is: If you get lost calls from numbers you dont know, don't call back. If it turns out to be a real call from someone you know, they will call again.

[adrianlondon]

This scam is popular in the UK, too.

[889]

[HashiriKata]

This scam is popular in the UK' date=' too.[/quote']

In the UK I also sometimes receive a letter saying that there is a parcel waiting for me at some delivering office and that I need to ring the office, a premium number, to confirm

[ipsi()]

Could someone please translate the picture in 889's post? 谢谢。

I tend to get email scams on a weekly basis, but nothing apart from that. Unless you count the people trying to sell some form of religious book on the streets?

[ocpaul20]

not really a scam but related to an earlier post about lychee colouring.

The honey I buy from the chinese supermarkets (and I have tried a few different makes) seems to turn my breakfast oats a funny kind of brown and when I soak my peanuts I get a really red coloured water out afterwards - even soaking with cold water. (If this was the ThatsBJ forum, I would get comments about soaking my peanuts in cold water!)

My take on all this is that chinese people dont like pale food and feel that it should be a 'nice brown or red' colour.

Maybe the answer is to buy foreign packaged foods but then you get it in the restaurant food anyway. I hear that a lot of the restaurants use cheap low grade cooking oil and possibly second-hand oil too. If you bothered too much about all the possible problems, you would go doo-lally, paranoid and worse.

[heifeng]

Actually I think produce in general is often dyed too, such as the leaves that get wrapped around 粽子, even just cabbage and such (saw this on the news). A teacher just told us never buy the really brightly colored produce...

This is probably the worst story I've heard, coming from a teacher about her hometown. Anyway one of the farmers used way too much pesticide one year. The locals all "knew" but no one was really certain what the end result would be...Anyway that family ended up feeding some of the rice/grain (whatever it was) to their livestock, which then all died. However, since this was their main income for the entire year, they still sold the grain on the market.....

[889]

No, the picture has nothing to do with dyed lychees.

It's from a brochure advising train passengers of various scams they might encounter. Here, passengers are warned against taking food or beverages from fellow passengers, especially the over-friendly type.

The cartoon shows Mr. Evil saying "Why, we're fellow villagers!" and Mr. Chump thinking "What a good-hearted guy!" Meanwhile Mr. Evil is tendering him a spiked drink.

Here's another.

This time it's gullible foreigners being led away by Mr. Evil. He's grabbing them and offering a shortcut to board the train, avoiding the time-consuming maze you usually have to tread at Chinese train stations. But instead of getting to their train, these unfortunate laowai will be led to some remote corner and forced to pay a 高额带路费 gao e dai lu fei, that is, an exorbitant lead-the-way fee.

[ipsi()]

889: Thanks, much appreciated

[wfujkramer]

I think the biggest chinese/chinese scam in china is the free "health clinics" that come to residential areas in cities. they will put up advertisements the week before they come advertising especially old people to come for their free health check. they'll set up a booth outside the complex, and staff it with a few people wearing lab coats. they check pulses, maybe even blood pressure, and then tell you you're in dire need of the type of vitamins/medicine/etc they are selling. which cost a few thousand kuai. older people are extremely concerned about their health, or the health of their family members and always cough up the money. even when you tell them it was a scam, they don't believe it, and say that their health is worth the money.

another similar example was selling a water purifying machine... which probably is a good thing for people to have.. except the fact that they were selling it for 10,000 kuai and claiming it reduces aging and increases longevity, and makes it impossible for you to become sick. in my experience, the chinese will believe almost any claims in the world when it comes to health issues. even the young generation.