Residents of Shanghai and Beijing are most capable of identifying telecom fraud, with mobile phone users taking only about 18 seconds to see through calls from scammers, according to a survey recently released by leading Chinese anti-virus software firm Qihu 360.
The survey conducted by Qihu 360 in August showed that Shanghai residents can identify fraudulent calls in 18.5 seconds on average, while Beijing residents can do so in 18.7 seconds.
Beijing was found to be home to the most scam callers with 15.1 percent, followed by Shanghai with 13.8 percent.
In general, people living in southern and eastern China were found to be more capable of identifying telecom frauds than those living in northern and western China.
The survey also found that it took Taiwan residents took the longest time to identify fraudulent calls, with an average of over 40 seconds.
The survey monitored the average time it took for users to hang up the phone and tag the caller's phone number as a fraud after they received a scam call.
Separately, the survey also found that Qihu 360's mobile phone guard blocked 3.4 billion calls in August, 445 million of which were fraudulent calls. Of these fraudulent calls, 43.2 percent were financial scams, while swindlers in 25.2 percent of cases were found to falsely assume the identities of police officers, judges, prosecutors or the relatives of their targets.
At a press conference on Sunday in Wuhan, Central China's Hubei Province ahead of the upcoming China Cybersecurity Week, Qihu 360 founder Zhou Hongyi said that China's cyber security situation is tough, calling on mobile phone users to actively tag phone numbers used by pranksters or frauds.
A professor at Tsinghua University was recently scammed out of 17.6 million yuan ($2.5 million) by a group of phone swindlers who posed as officials from law enforcement and judicial departments, according to media reports.
