Chinese business & economic reforms
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Chinese police are using a new anti-fraud program installed on cell phones over 200m to identify and interrogate foreign observers, according to a call from government officials.
The program was launched in March by the National Anti-Fraud Center of the Ministry of Security and banned suspicious phones and reported crime. Police say there is a need to tackle the scourge of fraud, which is often perpetrated by foreign powers under Chinese and Taiwanese citizenship.
The ministry has called for the program to be phased out, but many government agencies have enacted legislation for co-workers and co-workers, such as students and renters.
A Shanghai user told the Financial Times that police found him after receiving a report on the US financial crisis. She was also asked if she communicates with outsiders and frequently visits external websites.
The user, who asked not to be identified, said police appear to be involved in external fraud. “But the questions he asked if I had spoken to outsiders made me feel like he didn’t want me to get foreign pages,” he added. “I removed the app after the meeting.”
A second user in the eastern part of Shandong province said police phoned him four days in a row and the program showed he had visited what he called “extremely dangerous” information providers, including Bloomberg.
“He said he removed the ‘scary’ name from Bloomberg but nothing happened,” said the user. “The authorities are not saying how to determine if another external page is related to fraud.”
The program has also raised a number of complaints about online privacy from people who have said they need to lower their rental housing or enroll their children in school.
Twelve people told FT they were not comfortable giving the app 29 licenses, including price monitoring, text messages and interviews, to put on their phones.
“I’m not giving the government a chance to get anything out of my life to avoid fraud,” said a Shanghai advertising manager who has ignored several requests to set up the program.
Parents from across the region said they had to download the program before allowing them to enroll their children in school. In Shenzhen, some homeowners are asked to rent before signing a lease.
“I have never seen any abuse of public power by using an unpopular program,” said an office worker in eastern Anhui province who was supposed to download the program before applying for a license.
“This is a surveillance program that monitors everything on your phone,” added an office worker who removed the app a few hours after government officials told him to install it. “I don’t want to, no matter how good his intentions are.”
According to government records, China arrested 361,000 people for cyberbullying or online last year, compared to 73,000 people arrested in 2018. In April, Li Bei, a spokesman for the Ministry of Homeland Security, said such frauds were “cases that” is growing rapidly “in the country.
The program offers a lot of lessons to prevent fraud. “It has done a great job in cracking down on fraud,” said Jiang Guoli, a humanitarian security officer in June. Jiang added that the program sent a 23m warning message in the three months from its launch.
The Ministry of Homeland Security and the National Anti-Fraud Center did not respond to a request for comment.
Karman Lucero, a colleague at Yale Law School, said the program could be misused by the government. “It can be used to make a great impression on who you are and what you do even if you don’t listen to your phone or read the content of your message,” he said.
Additional reports of Nian Liu
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