Shanghai Street View: Scam City 沪经动向：欺诈之城
I often fill this column with positive stories on Shanghai’s sophisticated approaches to problem solving, but today I want to explore a darker issue that has seen China’s biggest city rapidly emerge as a haven for increasingly sophisticated fraud. Perhaps it’s just my personal view, but it seems like the number of con artists in Shanghai has exploded in recent months, with the result that media reports now appear regularly about the latest sophisticated racket. I’ve also seen growing signs of the problem in my personal life, and recently nearly fell victim to one clever scam which I’ll detail shortly.
One of the latest major scams to make headlines was uncovered at Shanghai’s South Railway Station, and involved official Red Cap porters who help passengers to carry their bags from taxis and cars to the station. A group of about a half dozen Red Caps had taken on the added role of scalpers in an effort to supplement their modest salaries.
Under the scheme, the Red Caps would help passengers with their bags, then offer to help them purchase their train tickets. But instead of escorting them to the official ticket center, they would take the unsuspecting victims to a private center operated by scalpers, known locally as huang niu. The passengers would then pay a big premium for their tickets over the actual price, with the Red Caps receiving a nice commission for their work.
This scam was particularly worrisome because the con artists were official train station employees, a group that most people would normally trust. The half dozen Red Caps who were uncovered in the scheme were subsequently fired, but I have no doubt that other similar cases exist where people you would normally trust are engaged in con game.
My own personal encounter with similar scam artists came late last year, when I received a text message claiming to be from my landlord at just the time I was due to make my next rent payment. The message claimed to be from my landlord, and asked that I make the payment to her husband’s bank account since she was out of town.
I nearly made the payment, and only a coincidence involving an unrelated visit from my landlord’s uncle led me to discover the original SMS was a scam. If not for that visit, I probably would have made the money transfer to the bank account in the text message, losing 3 months’ rent in the process. My landlord later determined my rental contract information was probably sold to the scam artists by my real estate agent, since only the agent would have all the necessary information for such targeted fraud. Again, the fact that some real estate agents would engage in such fraud was particularly worrisome, since such agents are a group that most people normally trust.
When I went to the bank to pay my landlord, I was reminded once more of the problem when I was asked to sign a statement warning me about potential scams. Days later I received a message from a friend warning of yet another new scam, under which groups of 3-4 con artists would surrounded a victim on a bus or subway, and then quietly drop a cellphone into his or her bag. They would then accuse the victim of stealing the phone, and threaten to report the matter to police unless they received some “hush money”.
I probably need to add a little balance to this commentary by noting that the surge in scams is hardly limited to Shanghai and is probably occurring throughout China. But that said, Shanghai is probably leading the country in the sophistication of its scams, leading even a relatively sophisticated person like myself to nearly become a victim.
If the city wants to maintain its position as China leading global city, it really needs to take aggressive action to combat this problem, perhaps by harnessing the power of social media or by handing out stiff penalties for people who engage in such fraud. If it fails to curb the problem, Shanghai could see its image quickly transform from that of China’s most cutting edge city to the nation’s leading city for fraud.
