7 ms·
Scammers prey on young Chinese desperate for jobs in bleak economy
- johnea 2y agoI'm not doubting the employment issues in China, but the examples cited in the article seem like pretty weak evidence. More like two individuals who were victims of fraud/exploitation. I have to doubt this would have ever been pubished at all, except for the male breast augmentation angle of the story.
- torlok 2y agoWeak evidence of what exactly? The title says people are getting scammed, then gives examples. What's your point?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bobthepanda 2y agoChina is a hotbed of scamming. The UN estimates that there are 100,000 victims of human trafficking to work at scam call centers in Myanmar alone, and many of those are Chinese nationals. https://www.dw.com/en/how-chinese-mafia-are-running-a-scam-factory-in-myanmar/a-68113480 https://www.dw.com/en/how-chinese-mafia-are-running-a-scam-f... The problem is so bad and well-known that a movie was published in China’s strictly censored market and made $500M at the box office. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_More_Bets?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_More_Bets?wprov=sfti1
- minusf 2y agoThe hong kong police had to release this statement recently: HKPF reminds the public that the following websites are not the official Hong Kong Police Force website. 1. 96o.1ss5623.com 2. joshhyoung.icu 3. amylfraser.xyz 4. tiaflowe.icu
- em-bee 2y agothese examples look ridiculous but you have to remember that people are used to chinese characters and can't easily recognize if a url written in latin characters is right or wrong. this is made even worse by the fact that even official websites are not always hosted on an official domain, and even when they are they use ridiculous hostnames, because again whoever is setting up the site just sees a sequence of letters that they are not closely familiar with.
- bobthepanda 2y agoThere is that and there is the fact that 50-60 years ago China was coming out of a Cultural Revolution that had shut down the education system, and places like Shenzhen were fishing villages with dirt roads well within living memory. It is not exactly surprising that in such a breakneck development pace that some people did not get up to speed at the same pace. ——— I will also say I think that China’s embrace of super apps and the quasi-app-internet is not helping with online literacy.
- djaouen 2y agoThe problem with having a country full of smart people is that the fraudsters are smarter, too.
- SoftTalker 2y agoProductivity has risen to the point that the world simply has too many people to meaningfully employ them all. If history is a guide, the correction to this situation will be ugly.
- fauria 2y agoWhat would that correction look like?
- Rinzler89 2y agoWar, rioting, increased crime, social unrest, etc
- deepfriedchokes 2y agoWar, probably.
- Simon_ORourke 2y agoI'm guessing whatever the poster has in mind it'll have some Godwin's Law style implications :)
- surfingdino 2y agoA revolution or a war, or both.
- undersuit 2y agoA slow unraveling of the accumulated wealth of billionaires and corporations. Catch the falling knife with your strong hand. Be even better if the rich did it voluntarily.
- logicchains 2y agoWealth destroyed this way just disappears, it's gone. As we saw after the communist revolutions in Russia and China, which led to decades of extreme poverty and tens of millions of people starving to death. There's not a single case in history where the state mass appropriating assets from the rich improved the people's standard of living; the only people whose standard of living improved was the cadres who now controlled all the nation's wealth.
- raincom 2y agohttps://archive.is/8f34k https://archive.is/8f34k Even many Indians are trafficked to SE Asia in the name of employment, only to scam Indians. And these scam centers are run by Chinese. [1] Cambodia: Hundreds of Indians rescued from cyber-scam factories: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-68705913 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-68705913 [2] Cambodia Job Scam Victims Beaten & Deprived Of Meals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5X5xVSiFHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5X5xVSiFHQ [3] In Cambodia, reporting on illegal scam centers brings threats https://www.voanews.com/a/in-cambodia-reporting-on-illegal-scam-centers-brings-threats/7687812.html# https://www.voanews.com/a/in-cambodia-reporting-on-illegal-s... [4] They’re Forced to Run Online Scams. Their Captors Are Untouchable. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/world/asia/cambodia-cyber-scam.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/world/asia/cambodia-cyber... https://archive.is/H7Vex https://archive.is/H7Vex [5] Inside the 'living hell' of Cambodia's scam operations https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20221109-inside-the-living-hell-of-cambodia-s-scam-operations https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20221109-inside-the-li... [6] Chinese Mob Has 100K Slaves Working in Cambodian Cybercrime Mills https://www.darkreading.com/cyberattacks-data-breaches/chinese-mob-100k-slaves-cambodian-cybercrime-mills https://www.darkreading.com/cyberattacks-data-breaches/chine...
- bugbuddy 2y agoThese are old news. Everyone keeps beating on Cambodia for this. There have been many crackdowns and the scammers have moved on to other countries. Cambodia is an easy country for western critics to rain on because it does not have the money to run its own PR campaigns like Thailand or Vietnam which also have many of these scam operations.
- yosefk 2y agoToo much "bleak Chinese economy" pieces in the West, not enough "China is leapfrogging us" takes. eg China uses machine learning to automate production more than is done in the West and lowers production costs, meanwhile in the West we say they're dumping/subsidizing their industry (when the reality is they don't need to, their cost is genuinely lower) and we're busy building another model predicting words or pixels while our ability to build anything from cars to artillery shells atrophies
- loufe 2y agoStarted out as a reasonable take then seemed to finish just as propagandist as you were accusing the headline of being.
- ein0p 2y agoI’ve been seeing “China is doomed” articles for the last decade and yet it seems to be chugging along just fine. My wife and I decided to go there and see for ourselves. Can confirm, they’re doing more than all right. We’ll be back.
- aquamar2 2y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/real_China_irl/comments/1ev4oin/%E4%BD%A0%E5%9B%BD%E7%9C%9F%E7%9A%84%E6%98%AF%E6%9C%89%E4%BA%86/ https://www.reddit.com/r/real_China_irl/comments/1ev4oin/%E4... 吃到一半，结果其中一人突然把话题转到了经济情况，他说现在经济十分不景气，家里的生易亏了很多钱。 另一个人则吐槽起了就业压力大，996，物价上涨什么之类的。 第一个人把矛头一转，对准了中共，说中共现在瞎搞把经济都搞坏了。 https://www.reddit.com/r/real_China_irl/comments/1evf77w/%E5%B0%B1%E4%B8%8D%E6%87%82%E7%95%99%E5%AD%90%E6%80%8E%E4%B9%88%E8%BF%98%E4%BC%9A%E7%B2%89%E7%BA%A2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/real_China_irl/comments/1evf77w/%E5... 如果粉红能思考, 自然也就不会粉红了. 那些留学还回去的粉红, 我至少还对他们保留一丝尊敬, 就算愚蠢, 他们至少言行一致. 选择留在民主国家生活, 但是离岸爱国的粉红, 我是真不太懂.
- whatshisface 2y agoThere's no contradiction between bleak economies (for individuals) and production growth when there is no freedom. The economy is for workers to squeeze against each other, the Party squeezes everybody. If you want a smaller-scale domestic analogy, look at how the federal reserve sees low unemployment as a sign to raise interest rates.
- TheChaplain 2y agoI've been nagging about it for years, there are too many people and not enough jobs. And it's one large reason why salaries have stagnated, especially in the service industry where there are numerous applications for a position, they'll simply get the lowest bidder who is capable enough to do the job. Raising the minimum wage could help a little, but I suspect most will just cut employees and merge roles, and again find the lowest bidder.
- layer8 2y agoIn the end, Earth is an economically closed system, and what everyone collectively earns and spends must be in some balance. In that light, I’m not sure the total number of people is a problem, barring overpopulation.
- kube-system 2y agoThat idea is incompatible with all mainstream economic science. Economies are not closed systems, wealth can be created and destroyed. This is, for example, why industrialization led to wealthier societies. The productivity gains created more wealth per person. Likewise, you can bomb a city and a lot of wealth will be destroyed. What you all are discussing is specifically the jobs market, which is a much more narrow issue. The biggest problem with employment is matching worker skill to the available jobs.
- layer8 2y agoI didn’t mean to imply that there is a conservation of wealth. I meant that there is no exchange with participants outside of the population of Earth; and at any given time, if you want people to be able to spend x, they must also be able to earn x. And if you have an economy that works with a population of n, then in principle the same should be possible with a population of (say) 2n, because you can just imagine having the first one twice independently side-by-side. The only hard limit is when you exceed Earth’s resources, hence overpopulation. But we’re not there yet, and according to projections we also won’t reach it this century. The reason for our present difficulties is not that there are too many people.