It's one of the oldest scams in the book " a caller says your kids are in trouble and asks for money. The surprise is that many people, often the elderly, still fall for this age-old trick.
But a bigger surprise may be that the racket is getting a Gen Z makeover, and young people are falling for it.
The accomplices: easy one-touch mobile payment transfers and the fact that most Gen Z, the digital natives who prefer online chats to voice calls, won't think of calling the other party to check.
For Xue Youbo, an 18-year-old college student, it was all over in a few seconds.
The fraudster hacked into a social media account of one of Xue's friends, enabling him to impersonate the friend and send an urgent request for money with the excuse that his father was in a car accident.
Xue lost 5,000 yuan ($700) after instinctively scanning the WeChat payment QR code that his "friend" sent him.
"Very outmoded scam, right?" Xue said in frustration. "The whole process " scanning the QR code and facial recognition payment … only took me one minute."
"I've always heard about people losing money to online fraud but never expected it happened to me," Xue said. "I learned that lesson at the very beginning of my college life."
Xue's experience is becoming more common among Chinese teenagers born in the digital era.
They have led a generational shift in communication patterns and payment habits " from offline to almost entirely internet-based " but the online convenience they enjoy puts them at a higher risk of being defrauded.
Young people are increasingly falling victim to scams involving fraudulent money transfers, according to China's internet watchdog.
The post-2000 generation accounted for 15.8% of China's online fraud victims in 2018, surging from just 0.7% in 2014, according to a report from the Liewang Platform, a website where Chinese internet users report online fraud cases.
In all, an estimated 390 million yuan ($55 million) was lost to internet fraud last year, reaching a five-year high, the report said.
The young are being duped at a much faster pace than other age groups because of their more frequent use of online payment platforms like WeChat Pay and Alipay, which have increasingly been targeted by fraudsters.
Alipay, owned by Alibaba Group, also owns Inkstone.
Legal expert Cui Xiaojun warned that users should call friends to confirm the authenticity of any request for money made via social media platforms like WeChat, QQ or by email, he was quoted saying by state-media people.cn.
Although Gen Z are the fastest-growing target for online fraudsters, their average losses of 2,000 yuan ($283) per scam are still the lowest of any age group, the report said.
Copyright (c) 2019. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
