Results tagged “fraud”

We just read an article about a woman who sued a boob job clinic after they tried over fifty fruitless times in the last year to enlarge her breasts. On the basis of this deplorable record, Ms. Zhao decide to sue the clinic, and she won. The general rule in Chinese law is 1+1 compensation — meaning that if you spend 4800RMB, as Ms. Zhao did, that you get 9600 RMB as compensation. For Ms. Zhao, all's well that ends well, but the more we searched for similar stories, the more we got the feeling that this was just the very sensitive tip of a dark and sinister iceberg of fraudulence.

Shanghai Daily tells us that around 30 members of the Shanghai Matchmaking Trade Association (yes, there is such an organization), have signed an agreement promising to be honest to their customers. If information provided by these agencies turn out to be false, or if their service isn't satisfying, customers will get a refund. The trade association also said they will inspect these companies once a year to make sure they live up to their standards.

Liu Genshan, "Shanghai's King of the Road," has been detained on suspicion of bank loan fraud involving 4.6 billion yuan ($671 million). The highway and property development tycoon, one of China's richest men, was held for questioning by officials a week ago, the Shanghai Daily reports. According to AFP, police are investigating Liu's transactions in connection with the Yongjin highway, which opened in 2005. Liu was first accused earlier that year of moving 3 billion yuan in bank loans for highway projects overseas through illegal private banks, in a report by Hong Kong's Independent Commission Against Corruption. According to China Daily, an "unnamed source close to the police bureau" confirmed that Liu is still under investigation.

Guangdong Province is mulling a new law that will categorise all jobs into "encouraged", "restricted" and "forbidden" for foreigners in a bid to restrict the employment of foreigners and to ban them from certain jobs.

People who made the news this week

This Youku video shows some women offering old men massage hanky-panky, all out in the open in an unnamed city, for as low as RMB5! The world's oldest profession is alive and well in China, and it is everywhere.

Hu in new bid to tighten screws on rival faction, by Chua Chin Hon of the Straits Times:

One has died from an undisclosed illness while another is already behind bars on corruption charges. But there appears to be no let-up in Chinese President Hu Jintao's attempts to put the squeeze on members of the rival Shanghai faction, a group of senior leaders and officials allied with his predecessor Jiang Zemin.

Continue reading "Snippets: The Shanghai faction, counterfeit and corruption"

Last week a ruling was handed down in the case of Su Qiang, a software engineer who stole more than 60,000RMB from the accounts of Shanghai MinSheng Bank (LinFen Rd branch) customers after successfully installing a program on their ATM operating systems that allowed him to collect the bank account and pin numbers of an estimated 7,000 customers. Su then purchased a card replicator on the black market which allowed him to recreate bank cards and withdraw money at will. He and his girlfriend eluded detection for three years by rotating through cards and never drawing more than a few thousand RMB at a time. Su will serve 5 years in prison and pay a fine of 50,000RMB for data theft. His girlfriend, Ah Feng, will serve 2 years and pay a fine of 20,000RMB.

Watch this video clip of the poor receptionist girl working at Google China getting harrassed by a guy, Zola Zhou, (once) billed as "China's first citizen reporter". Zola first gained widespread attention for his blog reports on the Chongqing nailhouse. Hungry for more success, he also went to Xiamen to report on demonstrations against Haicang PX. Hell, he even got interviewed by NBC.

We here in the Ist-A-Verse know that we're sensational, but it's very rare that we get a chance to be sensationalistic. This week, we've decided to have ourselves a little fun and try our hand at tacky tabloid headlines, using nothing more than our favorite posts from this week.

Today is one of those days where count our blessings that we are not rich and powerful and have never once (OK, once) been called a "tycoon." If those words describe you (and you are Chinese and corrupt and/or friendly with the corrupt) then you may not be free to breath in Shanghai's fresh sea air much longer. Just ask Zhou Zhengyi (also known as Chau Ching-ngai), who in 2002 was called China's 11th richest man with a fortune estimated at US$320 million. He was released from prison in May after serving a three-year sentence for fraud and securities manipulation, then detained again in October and formerly arrested yesterday on charges of bribery and using phony tax receipts. Someone needs to update his Wikipedia page.

We just came across a report about foreign inmates in a Shanghai prison taking the HSK test, commonly known as the Chinese TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). Many of Shanghai's foreign prisoners are kept in Qingpu, which has now become the first prison in Shanghai, and probably China, where the foreign inmates are allowed to take Chinese classes and then participate in the test. This time around, the inmates that took the test hailed from countries such as Australia, Korea and Singapore.

Photo by spiky247 taken from the Shanghaiist Contribute page. To see your photos on our Contribute page, use Flickr and tag your photos “shanghaiist”. Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site.

The story goes on to reveal that Baidu has a network of "200 different distributors who in turn farm out the others" to sell keywords for search advertising:

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781359.html">71st on a list on a list of 163 countries, ranked in ascending order based upon their perceived levels of corruption. While the government is quite publicly addressing corruption and it ain't exactly Haiti (#163), China has unfortunately earned a reputation for corruption and other forms of skulduggery and created a stereotype that is not likely to fade anytime soon.

Photo by chinapix taken from the Shanghaiist Contribute page. To see your photos on our Contribute page, use Flickr and tag your photos “shanghaiist”. Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site.

The latest casualties in Shanghai's ongoing pension fund fraud scandal: New Huangpu Real Estate Co. chairman Wang Zheng and Chen Chaoxian, Changning district's head honcho.

UPDATE: "Former head of China's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) Qiu Xiaohua is suspected of involvement in the Shanghai social security fund fraud."

Photo by 2 dogs taken from the Shanghaiist Contribute page. To see your photos on our Contribute page, use Flickr and tag your photos “shanghaiist”. Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site.

Shanghaiist keeps following these stories on rabies that keep popping up around the country. Slaughters are happening in places like Nanjing, and now stories about dog bites and rabies cases in Shanghai and Beijing. Our paranoid mind can't help but wonder if the state media is planting seeds of warning.

Shanghaiist is no law expert, but we just learned that there are no extradition agreements between China and Hong Kong. Back in 2003, the property tycoon (and then richest man in Shanghai at $320 million USD) Zhou Zhengyi was arrested in Shanghai for falsely reporting the holdings of his company as well as manipulating stock prices, and got slammed with a three year sentence. Here's basically what happened:

DCist helps us make more sense of the world this week. Posts like this concert review are the reason for Scott Stapp. DCist also enumerates the reasons for playing ultimate frisbee, Condi's tight buns, their love of a local convenience store, and their jealousy of a person in Seattle calling the city.

Regarding the International Herald Tribune article called "required reading" by some sites out there, Shanghaiist has one word: Duh. That, and please stop already with the cutesy movie-reference titles -- "Crouching corruption, hidden fraud" -- there's nothing hidden or crouching about fraud and corruption in China. But here it is one more time for good measure:

Recently the website of a Chinese "beggar" caught our eye. Titled “Give me one RMB to make me rich”, this site was launched November 8 by an internet user whose real name is Liu Feng.

Apparently, in China (unlike here, here or here) it's not legal to sell tracts of land on the moon:

It was just over a year ago that Shanghaiist was with a company -- whose CEO is rumored to have been beaten-up by thugs at least once and possibly arrested for fraud by Chinese police -- that was commissioned to write up a business plan for a Chinese developer based in People's Square, looking to add a little amusement park gaudiness to the Square's collection of museums. The developer had been making frequent trips between London and Shanghai, working hard at luring the Tussauds Group into China. But Shanghaiist never heard anything more about a wax museum for the city and assumed Shanghai was safe. Until now:

Chinese Communist Party officials will be forced to make known their extramarital indiscretions after a very public break-up between one disgruntled mistress and her CCP-employed ex-lover.