BEIJING, December 14, 2012 (City Weekend) — It’s rare to come across someone who has never been scammed, cheated, lied to or given the run-around in China, but it’s even more rare to find someone who has done something about it.
Instead of moaning, the guys behind China Scam Patrol and International Recovery Service (IRS), two scam-busting companies that were started by people who had been cheated, are taking action.
A former private investigator, “Kenny” took the bait in a scheme to sell Powerball lotto tickets in China. He lost US$60,000 which inspired him to start IRS in 2009.
IRS’s main goal is to recover the money their clients have lost to scammers, mostly in stock and investment fraud cases. The company doesn’t make money unless the client recovers theirs and they collect in an average of 72 days (after 90 days they give up).
But how can they get their clients’ money back from well-educated, white collar criminals operating under any number of aliases with constantly-changing phone numbers, email addresses and “offices”? China Scam Patrol scans cases and sends them over to IRS, then IRS agents do their homework.
“We don’t feel we have an ethical obligation to the cheaters,” Kenny says.
Although they operate in a legal grey area, nothing they do violates Chinese law. Kenny and his nine agents, including a retired bouncer and repo man, a Canadian Football League player, a high-end prostitute and a former U.S. Marine, track down scammers by comparing their photos to former aliases or people in the China Scam Patrol archives, hunting down license plate numbers, hacking email accounts or bribing bankers for information, among other tactics.
“You’d be surprised how much hookers know,” he says, adding that his two female agents, one a high-end prostitute and model, the other a beautiful translator, are often IRS’ best sources of information.
Once they nail down the identity of a cheater, someone from IRS will call the scammer to offer him or her the opportunity to do the right thing—return the money, plus interest.
If the scammer declines, IRS posts stickers showing the perp’s face and detailing his or her wrongdoings in the elevators of their home. Later, these stickers will appear around their place of business, as well as online at www.international-recovery-service.com and www.cleverchinacheaters.com, Weibo, Facebook, RenRen, etc. until the scammer caves and returns the money in exchange for a legally-binding non-disclosure agreement between IRS, the scammer and the scammed that also requires the cheater to promise to stop cheating—all without involvement from police or judicial authorities.
In the most extreme cases, the IRS threatens to out the scammer to his or her family, friends and associates, completely annihilating any semblance of face they may have left—something only a few scammers have allowed to happen.
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