THE municipal public security bureau’s Criminal Investigation Department put its center for fighting telecommunications fraud into operation Wednesday to further curb the rise of such crimes.
The center will be a command headquarters for coordinating banks, telecom operators, social media operators and the ‘call 110’ service center to fight against scams that use different telecom services such as telephones, Internet, QQ and WeChat.
The 110 hotline will be connected with all police stations. After the hotline receives a complaint about a scam, the system will initiate a quick response to investigate the crime, intercept funds and freeze the bank accounts suspected of being involved in the scam through cooperation with the banks, which have set up counters in the center. The city’s anti-fraud hotline — 8123-4567 — which was established in June 2013, will be used by the center.
The center will dispatch officers to the mobile phone companies — China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom — as well as the companies that provide online money transfer services, Tencent and Alibaba, to freeze, close or intercept those phones, websites and illegal domain names associated with QQ and WeChat accounts that are involved in scams.
By Aug. 5, the telecom scams in the city dropped by 20.2 percent compared to January-June last year. It was the first decline in recent years. Police busted 1,655 scams, more than double the number from the same period last year. A total of 1,324 people were criminally detained and 929 were arrested. Police intercepted 258 million yuan (US$382 million), and 45.89 million yuan in frozen funds were given back to victims.
A total of 5,085 bank accounts and 256 illegal websites were closed, and 4,927 phone numbers involved in scams were canceled. (Han Ximin)
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