We all know how fraudsters and scammers have all sorts of ways to deceive people. From impersonating officials to fake OTPs (One-time passwords), the list of methods is quite long.
Fraud, on the other hand, has been unlocked to a whole new level by this Chinese woman.
Guan Yue (pseudonym), a woman who worked 16 jobs was arrested on August 30, 2023, by the Chinese Police in Hangzhou province. The woman was attending another job interview when the police showed up, according to the local news report by Xin Min News. She had 16 jobs but never went to any one of them. Guan Yue used the money she earned from this scam to buy a villa in Shanghai in just 3 years. The wage fraud she committed on a large scale was only discovered recently. It happened when one of her employers noticed strange document inconsistencies and reported it to the local police.
Guan Yue did this by continuously applying for new jobs while already employed somewhere. During interviews for these new positions in new companies, she would take pictures and send them to her current companies, claiming these were from client meetings. Her husband, Chen Qiang, is also believed to have been part of this bizarre wage scam. Together, they kept meticulous records to manage their multiple jobs.
These records included information such as when Yue began working at a specific company, her job role, the bank account she used for that employer, and more. Over the span of three years, Guan and her husband orchestrated the scheme, accumulating enough money to purchase a villa in a posh area. They didn’t decline any job opportunities from any company. When they couldn’t handle a job themselves, the couple would pass it on to someone else and earn a commission on it. Their scheme fell apart in January this year when one of their employers, tech company owner Liu Jian, detected inconsistencies in Guan Yue’s documents.
The company had hired Guan Yue and seven of Mrs. Yue’s associates. However, after a 3-month probationary period, the company dismissed them after the team hadn’t made any sales. Soon after Yue departed from Jian’s company, she mistakenly sent her resignation notice to another company and multiple workgroups where Jian was part of one of these groups. When he saw it he was shocked as Yue’s resignation date matched when she was expected to work for his company.
He grew suspicious and reached out to the police for fraudulent activity. Upon investigation, it was discovered that Guan possessed multiple identity cards and bank accounts through which she received salaries from all her 16 jobs. The magnitude of her scam exceeded 50 million yuan. Yue, her husband, and more than 50 accomplices involved in the salary fraud were arrested upon investigation.
