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Fake Chinese military officials 'swindle 34 million yuan from construction firms'
Three farmers, posing as a deputy defence minister and PLA colonel and general, paid fees by 19 businesses vying to build 'coastal defence education bases', Beijing News reports
The office complex in Penglai, Shandong Province, where the "Coastal Defence Base Headquarters" was allegedly opened. Photo: Beijing News
Three farmers from Shaanxi and Shandong Provinces, posing as senior military officials, allegedly swindled 34 million yuan (about HK$43 million) from 19 construction companies through a fake “secret military project”, the Beijing News reported today.
Zhang Jie, Zhang Xiaoquan, and Shao Cunli, who claimed to be a deputy defence minister, colonel and general in the People’s Liberation Army, respectively, allegedly told owners of the companies that paying fees and deposits would win them the bids to build six “coastal defence education bases” that China was constructing on the coast of Liaoning and Guangxi Provinces, the newspaper said.
The owners of the building companies were allegedly asked to pay a deposit and a “confidential fee”, ranging from tens of thousands of yuan to millions of yuan, in return for becoming subcontractors on the “one-hundred-billion-yuan project”, the Beijing News said.
Some of the documents that were allegedly faked to help convince companies to invest in the “secret military project”. Photo: Beijing News
An office rented in Penglai, Shandong Province, was described as the “Coastal Defence Base Headquarters”, it reported; the three men claimed the office was an official military department in charge of the construction of the “secret military project”, the newspaper said.
In mainland China, the structure and personnel of many military and defence departments is not made public. The PLA also has a reputation for being secretive about its construction projects.
The Beijing News reported that the alleged victims had said they found the three men claiming to be officials credible after being shown what they believed to be genuine government documents and given a tour of the “headquarters”, where “staff” had been dressed in military uniforms and behaved like soldiers.
Police told the Beijing News that they recently detained three suspects in the case and had raided the “headquarters” allegedly used for the scam in August.
The newspaper also reported police saying that the three alleged suspects claimed to have been inspired to carry out their own scam after falling victims to a similar fraud themselves some years ago.
The three men claimed they had been swindled out of tens of thousands of yuan by people claiming to be government officials, police told the newspaper. But instead of reporting the crime to police, they become “inspired” to set up their own scam, the newspaper reported.
China struggles to crack down on fake military officials
Number of criminals making financial gains impersonating PLA officials soars amid culture of state corruption
Jonathan Kaiman in Beijing
The Guardian Friday 22 November 2013 13.07 GMT
The PLA is riddled with corruption, notoriously secretive, and enjoys weak disciplinary oversight. Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian
China's unbridled boomtown ethos has famously spawned a world of counterfeits. Fake Apple stores, fake pharmaceuticals and even fake meat has hit the headlines.
But in recent weeks, police have had their hands full with a more treacherous kind of sham – fake military officials.
The Beijing-based newspaper Guangming Daily reported on Friday that police in coastal Shandong province's Cangshan County arrested 15 people posing as officers from the People's Liberation army, the country's military, on 5 November.
The so-called fake military officer gang, backed by counterfeit badges and "confidential documents," had unsuccessfully attempted to convince local police that central military authorities had dispatched them to secure the release of prisoners.
On Thursday, China Business News reported that one fake military officer in the central Chinese city Xi'an lost 800,000 yuan (£81,000) to another fake military officer in an elaborate scam. "The mantis stalks the cicada, unaware of the oriel waiting behind," the newspaper wrote, borrowing a traditional Chinese expression.
The PLA is riddled with corruption. Notoriously secretive, the organisation enjoys weak disciplinary oversight and a strong tradition of camaraderie, enabling a culture of rampant graft. The sheer number of criminals to impersonate PLA officers in recent months- and the scale of their gains- testifies to widespread, tacit understanding of the organisation's grey economy.
According to China Business News, a 49-year-old man surnamed Mu first swindled 400,000 yuan from a local man surnamed Zhang - he claimed that he was a high-ranking military official, and promised that the fee would guarantee a place for Zhang's daughter in a northern Chinese military academy.
Yet Mu had his comeuppance soon afterwards, when a 50-year-old firefighting equipment salesman surnamed Hou convinced him to invest in a new military academy. A senior military official surnamed Yang, he claimed, was spearheading the project. Mu swindled an additional 800,000 yuan from Zhang for the investment; Zhang eventually reported him to the police. Police arrested Mu on 29 October, and his swindlers soon afterwards.
Police in Cangshan County traced their own case of fake officials to a "fake military training base" in Wuzhou, a prefecture-level city in the southern province Guangxi, and raided it on 9 November, arresting eight people.
Gang members had defrauded people across the country by promising mining permits and admission to elite military schools in return for kickbacks, Guangming Daily reported; the scam earned them 10m yuan (£1m) and 2m yuan worth of gold.
Pictures posted online show police brusquely apprehending the men, dressed in counterfeit olive-green military uniforms. One shows the gang's leader, a man surnamed Sun, apparently wetting his trousers in fright.
In late October, China's state broadcaster CCTV revealed that a 58 year-old man named Dong Xianwei had defrauded six families of 3.8m yuan since 2005 by posing as a PLA general.
Like Mu, he promised that he would help their children gain admission to elite military schools; he charged 200,000 yuan per placement. The same programme revealed another fake PLA official, Liao Heping, who made 3m yuan in two years by posing as a major-general.
