18 held in car loans case
Police with 18 people suspected of being involved in a car loans fraud in which a Shanghai company lost millions
Eighteen suspects have been detained in connection with a car loans fraud in which a Shanghai-based company lost around 70 million yuan (US$10.2 million), police said on Thursday.
In May, the company called police in Huangpu District about its business partner, a company based in Dandong in northeast China's Liaoning Province with which it had been collaborating on a car loans program for three years.
In the program, the Dandong company, Anyi, was responsible for sourcing people who needed car loans. The Shanghai company offered the loans for them to buy the cars, and they returned the loans later while their cars were mortgaged to the company before the loans were paid up. Over the three years, 1,088 cars were purchased through the program.
Early this year, the Shanghai company noticed that over 20 cars sold through the program had exactly the same GPS tracks, police said. Anyi was responsible for installing GPS devices on the cars so the Shanghai company could keep track of them.
The police investigation found that about 90 percent of the cars were purchased by people who didn't need them and had been sold. The suspects are alleged to have forged the Shanghai company’s stamp to clear the cars of their loan status to sell them.
One of the suspects caught in Dandong, a city in Liaoning Province this month
Anyi and a second-hand car dealer allegedly purchased other people’s identity information to buy the cars and then paid local private taxi drivers to have GPS devices installed in their cars to fool the Shanghai company.
Police said the Shanghai company found the same GPS tracks on several cars because the suspects had run out of private taxi drivers to take the devices.
The Shanghai company couldn’t have discovered the fraud earlier, police said, as the suspects had a good track record of loan paying until recently. According to the police, the suspects had a debt to the Shanghai company that snowballed so that in March this year they had to pay 3 million yuan.
Also, the Shanghai company calls people to check their identities after they apply for a loan, but to cover their fraud the suspects are alleged to have bought phone numbers for “applicants” and then hired people to answer calls to those numbers from Shanghai.
The investigation continues.
