Chinese man cheated of 22 mn yuan

BEIJING - A Chinese man lost 22 million yuan ($3,220,800) in just five days to a gang posing as government telecommunications officials.

The gang of 21 criminals in Shenzhen city in south China, posing as officials of the telecommunications department, telephoned a person named Wang, and said his landline connection in Shenzhen was connected to another landline in Dongguan city in Guangzhou province.

They asked him to pay the bills immediately. Wang, however, refused to pay since he did not have any landline connection in Dongguan.

A person from the “Dongguan telecom company” called and asked him to report the case to police in Dongguan city. Wang agreed, but was accused by police of money laundering by the “Dongguan Security Bureau”.

In order to “solve his misdoing”, Wang was asked to transfer all his money to a “safe account”. Wang agreed and transferred 22.64 million yuan ($3,314,496) to 36 different “government” bank accounts during March 30 to April 2.

After the transfer of the money, Wang did not get any phone calls from the department, and realized he was cheated and called police, the Guangzhou Daily reported Monday quoting police officials.

Police set up a special team to investigate the case, and found that the “Dongguan telecom staff” were from Ganzhou city, in Jiangxi province. A web phone was used to make the fake calls and the 36 accounts where Wang transferred the money were traced down to many Chinese inland cities, the Philippines and Thailand.

All 21 criminals have been arrested and 1.1 million yuan ($164,700) in cash, two cars and one kg of drugs were recovered from them.