Anti-fraud tips for office workers
Police officer Huang Yi gives a talk at Merck Shanghai on Monday.
Shanghai police’s door-to-door anti-fraud campaign has arrived at city office buildings.
Police of the Pudong New Area said they will make sure that all legal representatives, major managers and accountants at more than 10,000 companies are appraised of the latest tricks used by fraudster by mid-September.
“Nobody believes they can fall prey to the silliest tricks until they do,” Huang Yi, a police officer, told a gathering at Merck Shanghai, a German international company.
Officer Huang said no genuine police officer will inform a person of their alleged involvement in a crime over the phone, add them on WeChat to show them his police badge or ask them to pay any money.
Huang also introduced the local police’s fraud intervention call 962110 through which police reach out to residents who could be making calls to fraudsters and the SMS number 12110 through which people can report fraud messages to the police.
Zhang Yi, vice head of the public order squad of Pudong police, said the campaign targets both people who are not available in residential complexes during the day when officers call, and office workers who are in charge of company money.
“During our campaign, we try to make the chief decisionmakers and accountants understand that it’s more than necessary to double check with each other before transferring money to an account,” she said.
“Companies which have fallen victim are usually those with loose risk-control rules.”
From June 23 till now, Shanghai police have contacted 5 million families and more than 100,000 street shops in the anti-fraud campaign.
In the first seven months this year, police have managed to freeze about 260 million yuan (US$37 million) in banks before the money was transferred to fraudsters. About 3.8 billion yuan of loss has been prevented via various means.
The number of telecom and Internet fraud cases solved and the suspects caught in this period was up 32.7 and 42.9 percent over the same period last year.
The number of cases in which fraudsters pretended to be law enforcers and the loss in such cases was down 20.9 and 38.4 percent, police said.
From their anti-fraud call center, Shanghai police send about 35,000 SMS messages and make about 600 calls to potential fraud victims every day. In about 120 cases they have colleagues visit in person.
