A RESIDENT has been swindled out of 2.53 million yuan (US$378,176) by telephone scammers due to a personal information leak, the Shenzhen Evening News reported Saturday. In April 2017, the resident, surnamed Zhang, received a phone call from a stranger who was very familiar with her personal information. The man claimed that Zhang had helped a woman identified as Ah Yan apply for an exit-entry permit to travel to Hong Kong and Macao. The man told Zhang that Ah Yan was caught illegally carrying a number of bank cards to cross the border. Zhang was told to contact a police officer surnamed Liu in Shanghai. Although Zhang didn’t know Ah Yan, she was convinced when she saw the arrest warrant and the documentation of funds supervision on the website that Liu instructed her to visit. A few days later, Zhang was informed that she needed to raise over 2 million yuan and put the money into a designated bank account. Meanwhile, she was told to download some software and link it to the account. Zhang sold stocks, mortgaged her apartment and got a loan from a bank, raising a total of 2.53 million yuan to put into the account. In June 2017, Zhang found that her money was gone. She was told that the money had been frozen and that she should continue to raise money. Zhang realized she had been scammed and called the police. Shenzhen police found that the personal information of Zhang and her family had been illegally leaked by two police aides from another city in Guangdong. The two aides illegally obtained the personal information of about 10,000 residents and sold it to an intermediary agency for more than 10,000 yuan. The case was heard at a Shenzhen court. The two suspects pleaded guilty. (Zhang Yu) |