A TOTAL of 27 homeowners in a Vanke residential estate in Futian District were swindled out of several million yuan by a housekeeper who worked at the estate’s property management center, the Shenzhen Evening News reported yesterday.

    The housekeeper, going by the alias of Liu Jian, has worked for the estate for 10 months. According to a homeowner, Liu was responsible for running a WeChat account on behalf of the property service center to communicate with homeowners.

    Another homeowner, surnamed Lin, said she received WeChat messages from Liu last month saying that there were parking spaces for sale in the estate.

    Later Liu contacted Lin with his private phone and told her each parking space was priced at 150,000 yuan (US$22,388) and many homeowners were interested.

    Lin said she has been planning to buy parking spaces for a few years, so she transferred 300,000 yuan to Liu’s bank account to purchase two parking spaces following Liu’s instructions.

    Twenty-six other homeowners transferred their money to Liu for the same reason, which involved several million yuan in total. Some homeowners even signed agreements stamped with the official seal of the estate’s service center with Liu, and in return Liu offered them receipts pressed with his fingerprints.

    “He wore the formal uniform and badge and he sent messages to us via the center’s official WeChat account, which made us believe it was the center’s decision instead of his personal behavior,” Sun said.

    Some homeowners realized something was wrong after they noticed Liu didn’t come to work Sept. 22 and they could not reach him by phone. Liu asked for leave because “his father died,” according to the estate’s property service center.

    The homeowners called the police Sept. 24 and the center put up a notice in the estate after the National Day holidays, admitting that Liu had defrauded money from homeowners and declaring that the parking spaces in the estate cannot be sold.

    According to police, Liu was sentenced to prison from February to December last year for fraud. But he lied about his prison time on his resume submitted to the estate and said he was doing business during the same period.

    A spokesperson of Vanke’s property management company in Shenzhen, surnamed Zhang, said the company always verifies employees’ identification through an online system operated by the police. “The system doesn’t show a person’s criminal record unless he is an escaped criminal,” Zhang said.

    He said the document provided by the company where Liu previously worked noted that Liu quit the job for personal reasons rather than stating he was arrested.

    Zheng Wei, a Shenzhen lawyer, said Vanke should be held fully responsible because Liu sent massages to homeowners on Vanke’s official platform and Liu was a Vanke employee, which was enough to convince homeowners that the messages came from Vanke directly. (Zhang Yang)