Chinese scammers phoned man 14,000 times in one day, demanded cash to stop

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Fraudsters bombarded a man’s phone in Beijing with automatically generated phone calls 14,000 times a day and demanded he pay 300 yuan (HK$350) to stop the harassment, according to a newspaper report.

The phone attacks started at 5pm last Friday when the man received five calls within one minute,The Beijing Newsreported.

Each lasted only a second before the call ended.

The phone operator told the man, whose full name was not given, that no callers could be traced from the numbers, the report said.

The man also received two text messages saying his number had been attacked by auto-call software that would call him continuously from 8am to 11pm unless he paid 300 yuan via an instant-messaging platform on WeChat.

He did not pay and by the time he contacted the police on Saturday he had received more than 14,000 calls, averaging 600 calls an hour, the report said. The attacks then stopped.

A telecommunication experts was quoted as saying that auto-call software had previously been used by mainland law enforcement to block and control illegal telephone advertisement messages.

Officials would auto-call the contact numbers appearing in the adverts until the numbers became inactive.

However, the software has now become a tool for phone scammers, the report said.

People can pay 550 yuan online to buy an auto-call service with a lifetime service, according to the article.

It is illegal to harass people with multiple calls to ask for money and scammers could be face fraud charges, Han Xiao, a Beijing lawyer, was quoted as saying.