Baoshan district sees an increase in Internet-based scams

Internet scamming crimes comprised a large percentage of all online economic-related cases between 2019 and 2020, Shanghai Baoshan District's procurators said on Wednesday.

Among swindlers investigated, 53.9 percent of them have an advanced educational background and have stable occupations.

In one of the typical cases, two men were sentenced to jail terms of 10 years and two years and fined for developing an app to create a false future investment platform and lure people to invest money.

The fake platform presents the same future data as the real platform but is not connect to the actual market.

One of the defendants with a college degree registered a company and employed workers to call victims and pretend to be professors to "guide" victims into their traps. The other oversaw technical support for the app.

The two men scammed a total of 680,000 yuan (US$105,672) from their victims.

Additionally, the district's procurators have also seen an increase in cyber-economic criminal cases from 2019 to 2020. A total of 181 people in 55 cases have been arrested and investigated in 2020, as compared with 166 people in 50 cases in 2019, said the procurators.

About 85.6 percent of cases were found to be committed by gangs.

Now, professional and technical talents across many fields such as electronic data collection, computer technology, tracing identification and security as well as environmental industries have been employed by the procuratorate to help with specific cases.