Chinese telephone swindlers arrive in Beijing

BEIJING - A plane carrying 51 Chinese mainland suspects involved in telephone fraud who were hiding out in Cambodia landed in Beijing on Thursday.

This year, police have received a number of reports of telephone fraud in which victims suffered huge financial losses across several regions, including Anhui, Jiangsu, Jilin provinces, according to the Ministry of Public Security.

A victim in Maanshan city in East China's Anhui province lost 6.33 million yuan ($1.03 million) due to telephone fraud.

Police investigations found that criminal gangs hiding out in Cambodia were behind the scams.

The ministry dispatched a team to work with the Cambodian police. During raids on September 3, they captured 64 suspects, including 51 from the Chinese mainland, 11 from Taiwan and two from Vietnam.

As a result, the police cracked over 100 fraud cases, involving a total of more than 100 million yuan.

Telephones and computers, duping scripts, credit cards and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol, a type of Internet phone service), which were used by the suspects to extort money from people in China's mainland, were confiscated.

Telephone fraud has become a problem in China, to which suspects often use overseas servers to make phone calls, making it more difficult for police to trace them.

Swindlers would telephone their victims in China, pretending to be court or police officials claiming that the victim's bank account had been breached, and would tell the victims they should transfer their money to a separate "safe account."