CCTV9英语新闻：Billions of yuan were swindled from victims every year

'Boiler rooms' run by scammers from Taiwan have been responsible for more than half of all the telecom fraud on the Chinese mainland.

 

According to the Ministry of Public Security, nearly all major cases -- with reported losses in excess of 10 million yuan -- were organized from Taiwan.

 

This was how they did it. The perpetrators, pretending to be police officers over the phone, informed their victims that their identities were being used to facilitate money laundering. They explained that their money must be transferred to a "safe account" for investigation, and instructed them how to do it.

 

Figures show there were more than 400,000 telecom fraud cases in China in 2014 alone, hitting China's economy by 10.7 billion yuan. And the number increased to nearly 600,000 cases and 22.2 billion yuan the following year.

 

In the past few years, police from the mainland and Taiwan have arrested more than seven-and-a-half thousand suspects -- about 4,600 from Taiwan -- in operations to fight telecom fraud in Southeast Asia. But in many cases, handled by Taiwan's judicial organs, suspects were not brought to justice and victims on the mainland were unable to retrieve their lost money.