Extreme text scams in China are threatening execution if people don’t pay up

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Even in China, the global leader in executions, the threat of armed police going door-to-door and carrying out the death penalty against delinquent debtors is ludicrous – and yet, the thrust of a new text scam.

As people across China received messages this week threatening them with increasingly outlandish punishments if they did not pay up, discussion of the scam lit up social media, with some joking that three police officers named in one version – Wei Jun, Wang Lin and Guo Wenzhen – must be working especially hard given that they were apparently carrying out executions all around the country.

In a post on Weibo, a Twitter-like service, Beijing police shared screenshots of multiple variations of the scam, adding that it had left them “completely speechless.”

But while many people laughed, some warned that the scam’s ridiculousness could be the point. “Simply put, this is an extremely efficient way of screening potential victims,” a public security bureau in Nanjing told followers online. “If you can tell it’s a scam at a glance, the scammer won’t waste time on you. If you can’t, you’re more likely to follow their subsequent instructions, which might look more ‘normal’ compared to this seemingly insane text message.”

Scammers around the world have long used similar tactics. That’s why spam e-mails promising great riches are often so badly written. As researchers at Microsoft explained back in 2012, “by sending an e-mail that repels all but the most gullible, the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select.” Police and security experts have been warning for decades that African princes and millionaires aren’t trying to give away their money, but if you hit up large numbers of people – both text and e-mail scams can target millions if not tens of millions – enough of them may be taken in to make it worthwhile.

Still, Liu Deliang, director of the Asia Pacific Cyber Law Research Centre at Beijing Normal University, said that doesn’t really explain the “execution” scam; it’s so ridiculous, surely even the most gullible person is unlikely to fall for it.

“While in the past online scams took a needle-in-the-haystack approach of randomly selecting victims, the system is now more precise and targeted,” he said.

At the more sophisticated end of the spectrum, police in Northern China said this month that one victim had been tricked into handing over 4.3 million yuan ($827,000) to someone using AI voice and video manipulation tools to pretend to be a friend of theirs over WeChat, a popular messaging app.

Last year, Chinese police recorded about 1.82 billion fraudulent phone calls and 2.15 billion text scam messages. They prosecuted more than 391,000 cases of online and telecom fraud, a 5.7-per-cent increase over the previous year. China also has strict rules requiring real-name registration for phone cards, social-media accounts and domain names.

But the scams keep coming. In some of the most brutal schemes, known as “pig butchering” for the way victims are fattened up first, scammers cultivate a relationship with the target – sometimes romantic, often not – and encourage them to part with more and more of their money, until they have nothing left. “Pig butchering” comes from the Chinese shazhupan, and the scam originated in that country before spreading worldwide.

Sometimes those carrying out scams are themselves victims. In recent years, governments all over the world have warned of citizens being lured with the promise of lucrative jobs in Southeast Asia, only to be held captive and forced to work in huge scam call centres. Many were originally based in Cambodia, but after government crackdowns have moved to lawless areas on Myanmar’s border with Thailand, where they can take advantage of the former’s civil war to operate freely.

The situation has become so bad that last year authorities in Hong Kong and China set up a special task force dedicated to bringing those captive citizens home. Hong Kong police said they were aware of dozens of people from the city currently being held against their will in call centres in Southeast Asia. As well as being forced to work, the victims’ families are often pressured to pay hefty ransoms for their release.

Prof. Liu said the prevalence of scam call centres in lawless areas is in part reflective of the success of policing efforts elsewhere. He said public awareness of “pig butchering” schemes is also relatively low, though growing quickly with more reports and education campaigns.

“Combating scams is a comprehensive and systematic project that takes time and co-operation from all sides,” he said.

With files from Alexandra Li