Almost everyone in China has received calls from phone scamsters. They know your name, your school, your company, often your ID number and sometimes even your browser history.
The callers have different spiels: investment projects, real estate sales, insurance promotion. But mostly what they are peddling is fraud.
It's disconcerting to receive calls from strangers who seem to know so much about you. Questions bubble up: How do they know who I am? How do they know my number? How do they know I'm looking for a new apartment?
The best thing to do, of course, is just hang up. Those who don't often pay a heavy price.
On Monday, a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing was reported to have lost 17.6 million yuan ($2.67 million) to a phone scammer posing as a judicial officer. No further details were made public.
Only two days earlier, Xu Yuyu and Song Zhenning, two college students
Of the data is obscure — scamsters buy-ing from scamsters.
The online chatting app QQ is consid-ered a rife platform for fraud. Searching chat groups with the keyword "client information," one can access personal data at a very low price.
One group calling itself Client Infor-mation Trade opened in the Shanghai Huili Business Center. In its introduc-tion, the group advertised that it could provide more than 30,000 pieces of information on small business owners in Anhui and Henan provinces. "If you want to look for franchisers, please add the group," it advised.
Another group calling itself Client Information Resources said, "Please contact the group owner to trade client information. We have resources from all over the country and the information is updated on a monthly basis."
Newer details, higher price
The group boasted that its informa-tion was acquired "directly from the database of some websites" and was "absolutely real."
One of the anonymous owners said that the fresher the data is, the higher the price.
"First-hand data usually sell for be-tween 1 yuan (15 US cents) and 2 yuan per piece of information, while second-hand data cost 0.10-0.20 yuan," said a group owner. "Of course, the fresh data are much more accurate."
Meanwhile, getting a cell phone num-ber without real name certification is also easy. Sellers on QQ even provide fake "mugs holding ID pictures" to buy-ers so that they don't have to worry about activating SIM cards.
The phone numbers used usually start with "170" or "171" because those two number sequences have relatively weak management systems.
The Ministry of Industry and Infor-mation Technology approved "170" and "171" cell phone numbers in 2013 and 2014. The series are managed and sold by virtual network operators rather than managed directly by the three main tele-communication providers, China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom.
Those number series provide low-price plans to attract users. They also have big loopholes for fraud.
Government authorities have warned people that most, if not all, phone calls with a caller ID beginning with "170" or "171" are fraud calls.
The whole issue of personal data secu-rity looms large in the public realm.
In the past few years, calls for new laws on Internet security have been mounting. Last year, a draft law was published related to advising the public about potential fraud, but so far it has not been approved by lawmakers.
The Internet Security Bureau under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said the law might finally be implemented later this year.
"Hackers and viruses threaten our data security from time to time, and data abuse and leaks are another se-rious problem," said Zhao Zhiguo, director of the bureau. "We are trying our best to implement an Internet se-curity law as soon as possible, and are also pushing for relevant changes to the telecommunications law."
