Door to door alert for telecommunication scams
The leaflet police will distribute to households during a three-month campaign to increase the awareness of telecom and internet scams.
Shanghai police will visit 8 million households, businesses and companies over the next three months to alert people to telecommunication and internet scams.
Officers will knock on doors in the evening and over the weekend to talk to residents at home about the latest trends and remind them of traps. Community volunteers will be organized to assist police.
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 (US$13,100) to an Internet scammer.
When Zhou Zhiyun, a police officer of Waigang Police Station, visited a company on June 10, he learned that a woman 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 tried to contact the woman, surnamed Wang, but she was not available. Zhou then 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 met had met on the Internet so his luggage could be sent to China.
Police said it took them two hours to convince the woman that it could be nothing but a scam.
