Twenty-eight telecom fraud suspects were repatriated from Bangladesh to east China's Jiangsu province Thursday evening, local sources said Friday.They were accused of cheating Chinese mainlanders, with a total of 18 million yuan involved in 111 cases, according to the police.
In September, police in Yangzhou was alerted to a case where a hospital was cheated out 10 million yuan by a Shanghai-based telecom fraud group posing as law enforcement agents.
The case was reported to the Ministry of Public Security which demanded the police in Jiangsu to set up a task force and travel to Bangladesh for joint investigation.
Bank cards, computers, and mobile phones involved in the cases were seized during a surprise search on the houses rented by the suspects in Bangladesh.
Telecom-based swindling is a crime in which suspects cheat people through the use of telecommunications, and criminals have victimized many through such scams. The suspects allegedly made phone calls to people on the Chinese mainland cheating victims out of money by pretending to be law enforcement or with falsely promised high-return investments.
Since the start of this year, Chinese police dispatched work teams to several countries, including Laos, Indonesia, Cambodia and the Philippines and took back 750 telecom fraud suspects, according to the Ministry of Public Security.
Instant-messaging apps and illegal telecom technology are increasingly being used to swindle citizens. In 2017, there were more than 596,000 cases of telecom and internet fraud in China, causing economic losses of 13.1 billion yuan or $1.9 billion, according to data from the Ministry of Public Security.
As part of its efforts to address such challenges, China Mobile Communications Corp, the world's largest mobile carrier by subscribers, is ratcheting up resources to crack down on telecom fraud by leveraging big data and artificial intelligence technologies.
(Source: ourjiangsu.com)
