A MAN pursuing a doctoral degree in Shenzhen was cheated out of 85,000 yuan (US$12,971) in a campus loan fraud recently.

In just three hours, the student surnamed Zhang wired the money to three online money-lending platforms.

“I was overconfident and wanted to see what tricks they were playing,” Zhang said in an interview with Nanfang Daily.

On March 26, Zhang received a phone call from a person in Jiangsu Province, who claimed to be an employee of Ant Finance, telling him that the company had made plans to close its Ant Credit Pay and Ant Cash Now, because the banking and insurance regulators now required online money-lending platforms to stop lending money to college students starting March 17.

Zhang was thoroughly convinced by what the caller said, as he could also accurately inform Zhang of his own ID number and also knew the names of universities that Zhang had graduated from.

Zhang, after adding the QQ account and work ID of the caller and then being added into a WeChat group, was able to read the documents of the regulatory authorities for himself.

The information was later proven to be fake, and the WeChat group turned out to actually be a group of conmen.

Under the direction of those in the chat group, Zhang closed his Ant Credit Pay account and the account he had at www. jd.com. In complete trust, Zhang accepted the requests from the chat group for him to share his screen so they could help him cancel the accounts.

Zhang entered the interface of China Merchants Bank’s app and was told to take out a small loan of money. Zhang, feeling this was strange, made several inquiries, all of which were responded with the lie that the load application was going to be used for checking his credibility, not for borrowing any actual money. Accepting their answer, Zhang borrowed 10,000 yuan from the bank.

“After 30 seconds, I checked and didn’t find any record of the loan transaction. So I completely trust the fraudsters,” said Zhang.

Zhang later learned those kinds of records are not normally instantly generated, and the loan inquiry record is not very easy to find in the app. All of these reasons explain why Zhang didn’t find the records at the time of inquiry.

For unbeknownst reasons, Zhang set his mobile phone up with a “compulsory call transfer,” which meant all phone calls for him started being transferred to the phone of the fraudsters so they can follow up with the money transfers.

Zhang’s friends once tried to warn Zhang that he might be becoming the victim of a scam, but Zhang firmly believed the people he was speaking to were employees with official identities.

Zhang later also took out loans of 45,000 yuan and 30,000 yuan online and transferred them to the accounts designated by the scammers.

The fraudsters later asked Zhang to continue borrowing money, but this time from the Baidu loan platform. Zhang knew something was wrong when the Baidu customer support asked him to give the reasons for borrowing the money.

“I didn’t even believe I was being cheated when I called police,” Zhang said.

Zhang is not a standalone case. A doctoral degree student of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law was also cheated out of 100,000 yuan over just two hours in a similar case, according to the Nanfang Daily report. (Han Ximin)