Your host was on the receiving end of a notorious scam attempt recently. It started with a call posing to be from the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C. about a policy violation of a WeChat account that had apparently been registered with my stolen credentials in China. Someone had been selling fake Covid medicine online — and the Shanghai police were pursuing the criminal (namely, me). Suspicious, but concerned, I returned the call. It all sounded very professional: The people on the other end of the line gave me their full names and staff identification numbers — even a photo of the police badge and case paperwork. But within short order I was informed that I was the chief suspect in a million-dollar fraud — and that if I didn't follow instructions, I could be deported. This script isn't novel, but it is one of the many plots used by phone scammers targeting the Chinese-speaking population in the U.S. and overseas. And though I didn't ultimately fall for it — the scammers disappeared after I suggested they were frauds — these fishing expeditions are surprisingly and, often, tragically effective. Despite efforts from Congress to address robocalls, U.S. law enforcement has failed to combat phone scams and bust multinational criminal groups that often originate in Southeast Asia and Africa, many operated by victims of human trafficking in China, Taiwan and even Hong Kong. The Federal Communications Commission has adopted a series of new rules on service providers to stop "spoofed" calls — tech that masks real caller ID with a false number — but the scams haven't slowed. Fifty attorneys general formed a nationwide bipartisan task force in August to take legal action against telecommunications companies who failed to stop illegal international traffic to the U.S. "I'm proud to create this nationwide task force to hold companies accountable when they turn a blind eye to the robocallers they're letting on to their networks so they can make more money," said North Carolina Attorney General JOSH STEIN, who led the task force, in a statement. "China is, unfortunately, becoming a big player in scams both in Chinese people getting scammed and also Chinese scamming both Chinese as well as others," said JORIJ ABRAHAM, executive director of the Netherlands-based Global Anti-Scam Alliance. "They're Chinese, but they are actually based often in Thailand and Bangladesh, because the Chinese government is also trying to get them." Chinese embassies and consulates around the world — including Washington, D.C. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Australia and Germany — have warned against government impostor scams. Almost a dozen native Chinese speakers interviewed by China Watcher have received robocalls and unsolicited text messages in Chinese to their U.S. mobile phone numbers recently. One person we spoke to had been taken for more than $100,000. Overseas Chinese citizens have lost hundreds of millions of yuan due to telecom fraud, according to a video posted by a China Consular Affairs official on Weibo. "The pandemic has created more opportunities for scammers as many people were isolated at home and relied heavily on phone and online communications," said ALICE DU, director of communications at the Chinese-American Planning Council. She said her organization, based in New York, has noticed an uptick in scam calls and messages, especially targeting seniors. A first-year Chinese college student in California who asked for anonymity to tell her story was caught in a similar scam which lasted almost a month earlier this spring. Not only did she suffer a huge financial loss, but was psychologically tortured: the scammer put her under 24/7 surveillance via Skype and demanded she report on her activities three times a day. "I think he was targeting people who are new or just arrived in the U.S. who don't know anything about how the law enforcement works and are nervous," she told China Watcher. Ultimately, she did not report the case to U.S. police, deciding that it wouldn't be helpful as the money was transferred to Chinese accounts. Chinese police officials refused to take the case, saying they would only look into it if she reported it in person. There are many barriers that make it difficult for Chinese victims overseas to report their cases to the police, including language gaps, a sense of shame and distrust of police, said GRACE YUEN, a spokesperson for the U.S. non-profit Global Anti-Scam Organization. "The law enforcement has to be trained to be sensitive and empathetic to the scam victims, and ultimately to see that this could happen to anyone," she said. Combating telecom and internet fraud has been a policy priority for China's President XI JINPING — including new laws proposed to restrict suspects of fraud crimes from leaving the country. But with most U.S.-China cooperation having come to a halt amid the strained bilateral relations after House Speaker NANCY PELOSI's visit to Taipei, collaboration on this front seems unlikely. Still, the Chinese embassy in Washington told China Watcher that there's willingness to work with the U.S. government to stop this criminal activity. "We didn't have any collaboration with the U.S. government [on phone scams targeting Chinese speakers] yet. Hope we can have some platforms to work together in the future," said an embassy spokesperson. The State Department referred China Watcher to the United States Secret Service, but the agency did not respond to a request for comment. The Federal Trade Commission would not confirm nor deny the existence of any investigation when asked whether there was joint action with the Chinese government on any cases. Abraham said policy changes are needed to share scam data across countries. "If we want to win this war, as legal entities, we have to share information," he said. TRANSLATING WASHINGTON — BEIJING OVERREACTED, SAYS U.S. AMB: U.S. Ambassador to China NICHOLAS BURNS said China needs to convince the rest of the world it is not an "agent of instability" in an interview with CNN on Friday, six months into his post. Burns, who was summoned by Chinese officials for a dressing down on Aug. 2, said House Speaker NANCY PELOSI's visit to Taiwan "was a manufactured crisis by the government in Beijing." "It was an overreaction," Burns said. His interview didn't go unnoticed in Beijing. "The remarks of Ambassador Burns confound right with wrong and once again show the US's distorted and hegemonic logic," said a Foreign Ministry spokesperson on Monday. — CHINA CYBERSECURITY THREAT: The U.S. cybersecurity community is warning that China is laying the groundwork for cyberattacks in the U.S. as tensions rise over Taiwan, POLITICO Pro's MAGGIE MILLER reported from last week's Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. Former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director CHRIS KREBS told attendees to prepare for any potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan to prompt cyberattacks on supply chains that would quickly impact Americans. "Based on the conversations I've had with national security officials, they are pretty confident that is going to come to a head, with China and Taiwan," he said. — XI'S REQUEST: Chinese President XI JINPING personally asked Biden during a July 28 call to find a way to keep Speaker Pelosi from visiting Taiwan, the Washington Post 's YASMEEN ABUTALEB and TYLER PAGER reported on Saturday, citing a senior White House official. Biden told Xi he could not oblige, explaining that Congress was an independent branch of government. But Pelosi didn't pull punches in blaming the White House for endangering her visit: "Any attack on me personally is not associated with the President but with some smaller anonymous voices within the administration," she said in a statement to the Post. — XINJIANG DISINFORMATION WAR: The U.S. State Department released a report on Wednesday highlighting China's attempts to manipulate global public opinion on Xinjiang and discredit independent reporting on crimes against humanity and possibly genocide against the Uyghur population. "PRC-directed and -affiliated actors lead a coordinated effort to amplify Beijing's preferred narratives on Xinjiang, to drown out and marginalize narratives that are critical of the PRC's repression of Uyghurs, and to harass those critical of the PRC," the report stated. — SEVEN NEW ADDITIONS TO TRADE ENTITY LIST: The Biden administration is effectively banning exports of sensitive U.S. technology to seven Chinese space, aerospace and related-technology entities that it said are tied to the country's military modernization efforts, my colleague DOUG PALMER reported. The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security said on Tuesday it now has approximately 600 Chinese entities on its export control "Entity List," including more than 110 that have been added since the start of the Biden administration. — INDIANA'S GOVERNOR TRAVELS TO TAIWAN: Indiana's governor ERIC HOLCOMB led a delegation to Taiwan on Sunday, being the latest U.S. official to visit the island, Bloomberg reported. His visit follows Pelosi and another five-member Congressional delegation led by Sen. ED MARKEY (D-Mass.) last week. "The trip to Taiwan comes on the heels of two recent semiconductor industry announcements in Indiana including Taiwan-based MediaTek," his office said in a statement. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it "firmly opposes official US exchanges with the Taiwan region in any form and under any name."
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