ALL six wanted suspects in connection with a high-profile telecom scam linked to the death of a new college recruit are now in police custody after the last suspect surrendered himself to the police, Fujian police said yesterday morning.

    The suspects are all male aged from 19 to 35, five of whom are from Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, and the other is from Chongqing Municipality.

    They are suspected of having fleeced Xu Yuyu, an 18-year-old woman in a rural village in Linyi City, Shandong Province, out of 9,900 yuan (US$1,490). Xu died of cardiac arrest Aug. 21, two days after the fraud.

    The Ministry of Public Security issued a wanted circular Friday.

    Xu, a high school graduate, had enrolled at a university in Jiangsu Province, and the money she lost in the scam was what her financially strapped family had raised for her tuition fees.

    Xu’s mother is disabled and is not employed, while her father earns about 3,000 yuan a month. To raise the tuition fees, they used up all of the family’s savings and borrowed more than 1,000 yuan from relatives.

    On Aug. 19, she received a phone call notifying her that she was due to receive 2,600 yuan in student funding. She had received an official phone call from the education authority the day before, so she did not question the authenticity of the second call.

    Xu wired a 9,900-yuan “activation fee” to the scammer’s bank account, hoping the money would appear in her student account, but it never did. Xu was said to be devastated and fainted on the way back home from reporting the case to police. Despite doctors’ efforts to revive her, she died. According to reports, Xu was healthy.

    Her death is not the only one linked to telecom scams.

    Just five days after her death, Song Zhenning, a sophomore at Shandong University of Technology, also died from cardiac arrest after being swindled out of 2,000 yuan — his living expenses for three months. So far, two suspects in Song’s case are still at large.

    Authorities are also warning against fraud and taking measures to prevent more students, who often lack social experience, from falling victim to telecom fraud as a new semester approaches.

    Wang Sixin, a law professor at Communication University of China, said that many young people lack social experience and awareness of security, so they are often unable to detect fraud.

    Wang suggested that parents and schools should provide students with more security knowledge.

    Tsinghua University in Beijing has started to give a security test this year for newcomers, who must answer about 500 questions about telecom fraud, transportation issues and fire prevention, before they register.

    According to Chinese Criminal Law, swindlers could be sentenced to life imprisonment if the fraud amount is “extremely huge” or related to “an extremely serious situation.”(SD-Xinhua)