Police, banks cooperate to fight telecom fraud

Chinese police, banks and banking regulators are working together to fight telecom fraud and protect citizens’ rights.

The Ministry of Public Security and the China Banking Regulatory Commission have jointly issued a document on the freezing and return of money involved in telecom and online fraud.

Last year, the ministry authorized local police in Beijing to establish an information platform to help in the effort against telecom and online fraud.

According to police sources, the platform has worked with the banking sector to freeze more than 400,000 fraud-related bank accounts involving more than 1.1 billion yuan ($165 million).

Many banks have improved the training of staff to enable them to identify and intervene in suspicious transactions.

Ma Xudong, a fraud risk management official at Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, said the bank is working with police and other banks to establish a blacklist of suspicious accounts to identify suspect transactions in a more effective manner.

“Most of the transactions involving blacklisted accounts can be successfully managed,” Ma said, adding that, as of the end of last month, the system had helped the bank intervene in more than 100,000 cases of fraud-related remittance, preventing its clients from losses totaling more than 1.46 billion yuan.

Chen Shiqu, a senior official at the ministry’s criminal investigation bureau, pledged further collaboration between police forces and financial institutions to protect citizens’ rights.

Telecom fraud became a public sore point in China after a case last month in which Xu Yuyu, an 18-year-old high school graduate from Shandong province, died of cardiac arrest after being cheated out of her tuition fees by a telecom fraudster.