Police in Uttar Pradesh, India, recently announced the arrests of 15 people related to a scam operation, allegedly run by a Chinese citizen, that used data pilfered from old memory cards and circuit boards to scam Indians into fake business “investments” and loans, India’s Times Now News reported on Tuesday.
Seven of the 15 arrested were Chinese citizens, Times Now reported, and one was from occupied Tibet; the rest were Indian citizens. China and India have a tense regional relationship and engaged in military conflict against each other as recently as two years ago. Much of the tension surrounds China’s illegal claims to Indian territory bordering occupied Tibet and East Turkistan, as well as objections to India’s friendly relations with America.
The scheme, which relied on an Indian call center used to harass targets into sending the culprits money, is the latest report involving Chinese nationals attempting to defraud Indians in the country. Last week, India’s World Is One News (WION) revealed that Mumbai police had issued information-seeking notices against 56 Chinese citizens believed to be involved in a plan to preside over shell companies involving “criminal breach of trust, cheating, falsification of accounts, [and] criminal conspiracy.”
Outside of India, Chinese nationals engaging in business with the blessing of the Communist Party regime have caused havoc in nations participating in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a debt-trap plan targeting poor countries, and in more developed countries where Chinese citizens have been arrested for intellectual property theft and spying. America has faced a surging wave of intellectual property theft cases tied to the Chinese Communist Party in the last decade.
Uttar Pradesh law enforcement officials confirmed this week the arrests of the 15 individuals accused of stealing personal data to defraud Indians. The group, Times Now reported, was led by a Chinese citizen identified as Xin Di.
“In their chargesheet, police said that Ravi ran an illegal mobile scrap factory in Noida to allegedly extract printed circuit boards and memory chips from devices and send them to China through Hong Kong,” Times Now relayed. “It is alleged the accused operated a call centre to support these operations, where they cheated several hundred Indians in the name of giving loans, investing in businesses etc.”
The news outlet noted that “a large chunk of the profits” from the scam ended up in China. To cycle the money through the Indian economy without being caught, police say the suspects set up shell corporations that laundered nearly 2.5 billion rupees (about $30 million).
Xin Di remains at large, according to India’s Business Standard.
In similar news, last week, WION revealed that police had issued “Look Out Circulars” — essentially a document urging transit authorities to alert police if they see the identified person — for dozens of Chinese citizens in relation to multiple schemes in which the suspects allegedly ran shell corporations, presumably also used for money laundering. Among the individuals accused are accountants and other finance professionals who allegedly aided the Chinese citizens with establishing shell corporations in the names of Indian citizens who were not, in reality, in charge of the operations.
“They submitted false information and documents to the registrar’s office. On physical verification, all the documents that they had submitted turned out to be fake. And this is where the EOW probe started. No arrest has been made so far,” WION noted, omitting any clear information on what the alleged criminals were using the shell corporations for. The outlet noted that a similar incident occurred in April, when Mumbai police issued 34 motions to arrest individuals for “fraudulently becoming directors of Indian companies.”
The Indian government has faced a growing wave of alleged criminal activity involving Chinese nationals throughout the past year, including immigration fraud. In May, police questioned Indian member of Parliament Karti Chidambaram over allegations that he had taken bribes from Chinese citizens to falsify visas. Chidambaram stood accused of helping nearly 300 Chinese citizens receive counterfeit visas to enter India, reportedly workers shipped in to complete a power infrastructure project.
Visa fraud involving Chinese citizens shipped in to work on infrastructure jobs is also a growing concern, particularly in BRI countries. In Kenya, for example, authorities unearthed a sprawling national immigration disaster in 2018 fueled by Chinese citizens traveling there on tourist visas, then illegally getting jobs building railways and other BRI projects. So many Chinese citizens overstayed their welcome that the Kenyan immigration system was too overwhelmed to process them all.
Kenya, like Malawi, Nigeria, and other African countries friendly to China, also arrested several Chinese nationals for criminal attacks on local residents including whippings and racist assaults. Malawi charged a Chinese national with human trafficking in July after a BBC investigation exposed the man for running a lucrative enterprise in which he tricked local Malawian children into making racist videos in which they insulted themselves in Mandarin, later sold to Chinese buyers on state-authorized websites like Weibo.
In America, Chinese nationals allowed by the Communist Party to travel — a luxury for those with a high social credit score — have been implicated in thousands of intellectual property theft and other intelligence and espionage cases, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray.
“We are opening a new China-related counterintelligence investigation about every 12 hours. We probably have over 2,000 of those investigations,” Wray revealed in February.
“There is no country that presents a broader, more severe threat to our innovation, our ideas and our economic security than China does,” Wray warned. “I’m referring not to the Chinese people, not to people of Chinese descent or heritage. What we’re talking about here is the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party.”
The Justice Department revealed last week the conviction of 31-year-old Chinese national Ji Chaoqun, present in America on a student visa, on charges of espionage and issuing the Army false statements in pursuit of membership. Ji was reportedly working directly with a local Chinese State Security Ministry in Jiangsu province.
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