Beijing Police have begun investigating a telecom scam that conned a teacher from one of China's most prestigious universities out of a fortune, The Beijing News reported Wednesday.
A notice posted in the Yejing Building on Tsinghua University's campus - a building which hosts organizations, firms and research groups cooperating with the school - said that a teacher from the university living in Lanqiying, a neighboring community, was scammed out of 17,600,000 yuan ($2,630,000) by conmen posing as officials from law enforcement and judicial departments, the Beijing Youth Daily reported Wednesday.
No further details were given in the notice.
The notice, which has gone viral on social media, also advises all the groups using the Yejing Building to reinforce their staff's awareness of telecom scams. The notice was later taken down.
Meanwhile, posters warning about this kind of fraud have been seen in the corridors of apartment buildings in the Lanqiying community. They were put up just after the police visited the area as part of their investigation on Tuesday, residents told the Beijing Youth Daily.
The residents of Lanqiying are mainly teachers working at the nearby Tsinghua and Peking universities, two of China's leading colleges, The Beijing News reported.
Banking staff told the Beijing Youth Daily that it is possible to transfer such a large amount of money at once as long as one can provide the client's information.
Following the deaths of two young people who died within days of each other after being scammed out of their savings by telecom fraudsters, experts previously told the Global Times that the reason why such cons are so common lies in the country's poor information protection and police inaction.
