TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Last Laugh! Chinese "Nurse" Hustles Lonely Hearts With Flirty SMS

Last Laugh! Chinese "Nurse" Hustles Lonely Hearts With Flirty SMS

Reuters News Wire (reuters@telecom-digest.org)
Tue, 09 Jan 2007 00:24:07 -0600

A Chinese company has duped about 400,000 people by creating the
character of a young female nurse to solicit text messages and collect
revenue from lonely men, a Chinese newspaper reported on Tuesday.

The Beijing-based company employed a team of 12 or 13 people -- mostly
men -- to act as "Wang Jing," a 22-year-old nurse who would invite
mobile phone users to become her online boyfriend and to seek her out
"whenever they felt lonely," the Beijing News said.

"Spending the whole day as a girl chatting to cheat people, I felt so
disgusting," Yang Gang, a 26-year-old male science graduate and former
employee, told the paper. He said the employees were told to try and
concentrate on 'hustling the American straight guys; they are fools.'

Yang said "Wang Jing" would ask mobile phone users flirty and
pornographic questions before luring them unwittingly into subscribing
to the nurse's chat for 10-30 yuan ($1.30-$3.80) a month, the paper
reported. Rates for Americans varied but included toll charges on text
and voice messages.

Yang, who would receive up to 2,000 text messages from people all over
China in a single shift, said the nurse scam had reaped hundreds of
thousands of yuan a month, the paper reported.

It said the service had drawn complaints but did not say if it was under
investigation.

Text message scams and unsolicited spam flogging everything from real
estate to weapons are common in China, where telecommunication service
providers allow companies to bombard mobile phones for a cut of the
profits. China users are reputed to be responsible for a huge majority
of the spam and porn entering the United States from elsewhere.

Copyright 2007 Reuters Limited.

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