Staff among 67 arrested for defrauding insurance firm
The suspects were rounded up from Shanghai as well as Hubei, Jiangsu and Anhui provinces in a recent police raid.
Sixty-seven suspects have been caught for allegedly defrauding an insurance company, Shanghai police said on Thursday. Some of them worked for the firm.
The suspects allegedly embezzled more than 60 million yuan (US$9.3 million) in company bonuses for new salespeople, who sales records were boosted by using fraudulent means.
The insurance company, whose name was not revealed, reported the case to police in Jing'an District in August last year.
The company started an investigation on its own after receiving several complaints from clients that they were approached by people claiming to be the company's sales personnel and persuaded to give up their original policies and buy new ones.
In its police complaint, the company said it found that some of its sales staff were running a fraud scheme along with some outsiders.
One of the company's clients, a woman surnamed Li who lives in Ningbo city, Zhejiang Province, told police that she was approached by a man surnamed Liu in April who claimed to be from the company. She was persuaded to purchase another insurance policy and lost no money in terminating her previous one.
However, when Li filed a claim to the company based on the new policy, she found that the salesman who served her was a man surnamed Zhang and that the policy was totally different from what she heard from Liu, who was out of touch.
The company told Li that Liu was not its employee.
Liu was in fact an illegal insurance salesman hired by a man surnamed Xu, who has over 10 years' experience in the insurance industry. Xu was in touch with two people in the management team of the firm's Shanghai branch.
The duo provided contact information of the company's clients to Xu's illegal sales team, and the new policy contracts signed were registered under the names of the firm's new employees, who were then given bonuses for exceptional sales, police said.
The 67 suspects were rounded up from Shanghai as well as Hubei, Jiangsu and Anhui provinces in a recent raid by police.
Among them, 23 suspects have been arrested on embezzlement, the others are still under restrictive measures on suspicion of criminal activities.
