City police more efficient in screening scam messages

Shanghai police said on Friday they have intercepted about 115,000 scam calls so far this year, six times more than last year.

Meanwhile, the scam SMS messages intercepted daily increased 49 percent from the same period last year to 390,000, while 24.7 million visits to scam websites were cut off, according to the police.

This was the result of a concerted effort between police, the city's telecom operators and communications administration, police said.

As a result, the number of telephone, SMS message and Internet scam cases reported so far this year decreased 29.5 percent, 3.9 percent and 4.2 percent, respectively from the same period last year.

Over the same period, the number of scam cases solved and suspects caught in those cases was up 13.4 and 122.4 percent, respectively, police said.

About 140,000 residents were alerted by police as they were being contacted by scammers every day, and about 1,400 people who kept ignoring warnings from police were visited by police in person.

Shanghai police operate an anti-fraud center which is technically equipped to detect suspicious scam calls and other messages from scammers to residents.

Police said they have also accelerated the interception of money transferred by victims to scammers over banks after the cases are reported, with over 510 million yuan (US$80 million) of losses recovered for the residents so far this year.

To deal with the increasing telecom and Internet scams against businesses in recent years, Shanghai police said they have been working with local banks to prevent money transfers to suspicious accounts as much as possible, which has resulted in a sharp decline of such scam cases among corporate clients of four major local banks.