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Mobile phone users warned about traps
(CRI)
Updated: 2005-11-02 21:54 Attention, Chinese mobile
phone users!
If your phone rings and it stops ringing before you answer the call, you
might be inclined to return the call without checking the caller's identity.
DON'T DO THAT!!!
If you call back numbers starting with 0941, or 0951, you will be charged 500
Yuan or over 50 U.S. dollars each time on your bill for such fake callers.
That's only one of the traps set for mobile phone users, Chinese police are
warning.
Similar crimes relating to fake or illegal telephone calls or short text
messages have been flooding and targeting mobile phone users in the country,
according to reports.
To address rising concerns from the public, Chinese authorities have begun a
nationwide crackdown on the fake and illegal short message services, a newspaper
said.
The People's Daily reported on Wednesday that the national campaign is being
jointly organized by the Ministry of Public Security, Ministry of Information
Industry, and the China Banking Regulatory Commission, in a bid to protect the
interests of the common people.
The public security authority has called on the public to report incidents of
wrongful SMS messages to the hotline number 110.
The newspaper reports that authorities have outlawed categories of SMS texts
including:
fake messages in the name of a banking services;
pornographic, gambling, violence and terrorist related information; teaching
crimes;
illegal sales of arms, explosives, vehicle and drugs smuggling; fake
banknotes, invoices;
Fake lottery information, illegal matchmaking and job offers, prostitution,
and whatsoever out of line with the laws and regulations in China.
Police officers are warning the public against the illegal and fake SMS
messages, saying that criminal suspects operate in groups behind the scene,
often generating huge amounts of illegal SMS messages using equipment assembled
together in remote places.
The criminals sometimes claim to offer bank account and transferring
services, often with compelling features, and even claiming to be in the name of
banking and public security offices themselves.
The officers briefed the media on a fake SMS case in Shanghai.
From August 19, 2005, people in Shanghai reported to public security
officials that they had received short text message claiming that they had spent
a certain amount of money in a shop and then were required to transfer money
from Automatic Teller Machines (ATM) to another designated account for the sake
of security.
Local police later found out that the two criminal suspects from Taiwan and
six from Fujian were behind the series of fake message plots. They used fake
personal ID cards, credit card, cell phone numbers, and message sending machines
equipped on personal computers in their cheating activities. The eight suspects
operated successfully more than 140 times in Shanghai and collected over 10
million Yuan or over 1,200,000 US dollars from victims' accounts in the city.
The officers warn the public to beware of the fake and illegal messages from
unknown or unapproved sources, urging phone users to be careful in dialing
strange telephone numbers. They also advise that no credit card information
should ever be transferred to others electronically, or money transferred to a
strange account.
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