Police bust Internet loan shark gang that scammed US$97 million from victims

Ti Gong

A total of 86 suspects have been caught for allegedly running an Internet loan fraud that entrapped over 10,000 people around the country, Shanghai police said on Thursday.

The victims lost about 630 million yuan (US$97 million) to the suspects, police said.

Police in Fengxian District started their investigation in May this year after finding that several residents of the district had borrowed money from some Internet platforms and ended up deeply indebted to the lenders.

The Internet loan platforms, operated through 23 mobile apps, were developed by a tech company in Jiangsu Province and then sold to the suspects who advertised low-interest loan services to the victims.

Other suspects were engaged to handle the illegal income through 41 bank accounts, police said.

When installing the apps on their phones, the victims gave access to their phone contact lists to the suspects, enabling the suspects to harass them by various means, according to police.

The victims were charged loan extension fees of 20 percent a day if they couldn't return the loans in time, a condition of which they were unaware when they borrowed the money.

The borrowers were bombarded by calls from the suspects and with ads for other fraudulent loan platforms from which to borrow new money to cover their old debts, police said.

To women debtors, the suspects even made threats of sending them edited pictures of naked women with their own faces superimposed, according to the police.

Under the "soft violence" exerted by the suspects, many victims saw their debts fast snowballing.

One of them, a woman surnamed Wang, borrowed a few thousand yuan in February this year and ended up returning about 1.5 million yuan to the suspects by May by selling her apartment, police said.

The suspects were rounded up from five cities and provinces last month.