Shanghai police to wage war on Internet scammers

Shanghai police will visit 8 million households, businesses and companies over the next three months to alert people to the latest telecommunication and Internet scams.

Police said delivery services meituan.com, ele.me, FlashEx and Dada will help spread both paper and online reminders to their customers.

The campaign has already yielded results. Police in Jiading district said they had prevented a woman from losing 90,000 yuan ($13,100) to an Internet scammer.

When Zhou Zhiyun, a police officer at Waigang Police Station, visited a company on June 10, he learned that a woman, surnamed Wang, had began borrowing money from her colleagues. She told them she urgently needed to transfer the money through a bank to receive a parcel.

Smelling a scam, Zhou contacted her husband who said the family was not short of money, and added his wife had recently been typing on her phone till midnight.

Zhou and his colleagues informed all banks in the area of the possible scam and asked them to report to the police if Wang appeared. Wang went to a bank at 1pm that day. She told police she was transferring money to a "US soldier" she had met online so his luggage could be sent to China.

Police said it took them two hours to convince the woman that it was a scam.