Not long ago in Zibo, Shandong, the Zhangdian police busted a telecom scam gang that targeted single and divorced women aged forty to fifty who had a bit of savings. The suspects posed as successful, divorced businessmen online to romance their victims. After two or three months of sweet-talking them on the internet, they would redirect the women to an AI robot investment platform where they could manipulate the backend numbers at will, eventually making off with the money.
A local victim surnamed Liu fell right into this trap. She met a man on a social app who seemed mature, steady, and attentive. Not long into their online relationship, she was conned into investing over 600,000 yuan. It was not until January this year, when the platform became inaccessible and her online boyfriend went dark, that she panicked and went to the police. Police investigations revealed that the gang had already raked in more than 4 million yuan in total.
The arrests were no walk in the park either. Investigators tracked the gang down to residential houses in another province where they were running their operations. One of the suspects had previously been picked up by police elsewhere, while the rest went into hiding. By mid-August, officers staked out the streets in scorching heat to map out the hideouts of all eleven suspects. In late August, over thirty police officers were dispatched across several provinces. Moving in on the morning of September 1, they rounded up all eleven suspects in just one hour.
