Online scams, chinese plague.

If online scams once affected elderly people unfamiliar with the internet, today Beida students themselves sometimes fall into the trap. A finding : the degree of sophistication of these thefts continues to grow. Reportage.

Mme Ye, victim of a three-tier scam.

It all starts with an ill-advised operation: after investing in a fake P2P company, madam Ye 叶 lost more than 100 000 yuan (12 000 euros) . Desperate, she went to seek help on an online scam victim support forum. Shortly after registering, a man named "compatriot" contacted her in a private message..

« It is very difficult to recover losses in P2P, but i have connections, I can find you a way to get back what you lost ». The scammer manages to attract, in one way or another, Ms. Ye on game platforms. Like in any casino, Ms. Ye wins small winnings, decides to bet bigger and loses it all. A cet instant, as expected, the compatriot disappears.

Realizing what was happening to her, Ms. Ye decided to alert the police.

In the lingo, Ms. Ye has just entered a mechanism called "killing the pig" 杀猪盘.

Ms. Ye therefore alerted the anti-fraud center in her region. ; a “Zhou” policeman contacted him to warn him that the money was still in the territory, but only to get it back, it was going to be necessary to play "connections". Ms. Ye is forced to pay a “commission”. Once the commission of 29 000 yuan ( 3 700 euros) paid, policeman "Zhou" disappears into the wild.

Ms. Ye therefore found herself in three nested scam schemes.

After real police investigation, it turned out that “policeman Zhou” was himself a victim of online gambling platforms, forced to scam to pay off his own debts. It was actually a construction worker in a nearby town.

Nested systems of scams, well oiled, correspond to the improvement in the level of online scams that abound and constantly grow in China. The victims themselves, like Policeman Zhou, are caught in an infernal circle and become willy-nilly, themselves, executioners.

love : an argument of choice for "killing the pig"

Romance scams are the new black. In the flowery language of scammers, the victims are pigs to be slaughtered.

But before slaughtering the pig, it needs to be fattened up. This is the usual online scam mechanism, in two sequences : first of all, bait via chat, then start the slaughter process.