Hidden foreign-killing platform: "The leader said it was to help foreign users keep virtual currency"

Abstract

• During the 7-day trial period, Zhou Jun was learning how to disguise himself as a Japanese woman to attract Canadian users to join the group. At the close of the market, bundles of cash were distributed, "either deposited in batches into the bank, or used to buy gold."

• The victim was abroad and it was difficult to report the case to the domestic police. Some judgments did not have the victim's testimony and could only convict based on the number of messages sent.

• Most of those arrested were grassroots personnel in criminal organizations, born in rural areas, young and not well educated. Many people have the wrong idea that "cheating foreigners' money is not illegal."

• Virtual currency circulates between different platforms and countries. "It's no use finding out where the money went. The problem is how to get it back."

Main text

26-year-old Zhou Jun (pseudonym) has a secret. About a year and a half ago, he was nominally an employee of a "foreign trade company", but in fact he and his colleagues were defrauding foreigners of their money.

The job started in November 2023 and ended in March 2024. He entered the office at 12 midnight and left at 8 am. "Doing the Canadian plate," he explained to the Southern Weekend reporter why he was active at night and dormant during the day.

According to Zhou Jun's description, this job is like this: employees pretend to be Japanese women on social platforms, refer to the "talking book", find users from Canada to chat privately, and then pull them to the private domain chat software, recommend downloading a virtual currency trading app in a local Internet store, and encourage users to buy and sell virtual currencies on it to make money.

The app not only has instructors who specialize in teaching users how to operate, but also users who have made money sharing their experiences. But everything is fake, "we did it behind the scenes."

Canadian users exchange Canadian dollars for virtual currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, and invest in this app, and the company boss can witness everything in the background. These virtual currencies passed through several hands and flowed into the electronic wallet controlled by this "foreign trade company". After a period of time, the Bitcoin was exchanged by the company into Tether, a virtual currency pegged to the value of the US dollar, and then laundered into RMB cash, which came into the hands of Zhou Jun and his colleagues. When users wanted to withdraw cash, they found that the withdrawal channel had been closed. "The leader said that we were just temporarily keeping these virtual currencies for users, but later I realized that this was 'killing foreigners'." "Killing foreigners" is a folk saying in telecommunications fraud crimes. It is similar to "killing pigs", but the targets of the fraud are foreigners. The criminal gangs "make friends" with foreigners through "talking books", translation software and chat software, and after gaining their trust, they trick them into investing and defrauding them of money. In the past few years, "killing foreigners" has been the target of crackdowns by public security, procuratorial and judicial organs in various places. In April 2025, the Economic Development Zone Court of Heze City, Shandong Province reported a recent "foreign fraud" case. Nine fraudsters defrauded 66,800 Indians between June 2023 and January 2024, with a total amount of 517 million Indian rupees (about 40 million yuan).

It is not easy to eliminate "foreign fraud". Southern Weekend reporters found that in addition to going abroad to engage in telecom fraud, some "foreign fraud" are hidden in crowded places in domestic cities. To outsiders, practitioners are just doing a decent and ordinary job.

1 Speech, personality, "cross-border e-commerce"

Engaging in "foreign fraud" in a company in Tianhui Building was Zhou Jun's first job in Shenzhen after graduation.

Tianhui Building is located in Yousong District, Longhua District. Within a one-kilometer radius, there are large industrial parks such as Foxconn and Huawei, as well as the Sanhe Talent Market (now renamed "Struggler Square"), which was once famous for "daily wages". This is an 8-story circular office building consisting of four buildings, ABCD. On the morning of May 18, 2025, a Southern Weekend reporter came here. The main door of Building B of the building faced a busy intersection, and Zhou Jun entered the office building from here.

Except for some street-facing shops that have been converted into hotels and shops, the rest of the units in the building have been divided into compartments of varying sizes and are listed on both sides of the corridor. Most of them are surrounded by opaque glass curtain walls, and the names of companies and institutions are basically not displayed outside the curtain walls, making it difficult for others to know the company's main business from the outside.

On the surface, Zhou Jun's job is indeed attractive: in the foreign trade industry, the company provides mobile phones, computers and other office supplies and translation software; the commuting time is short, and only two traffic lights are required to get to work; there are six days a week, "because foreigners don't like to use social software on Sundays", there are fixed working hours, and leaders and colleagues will not contact after get off work; the basic salary is 4,000 yuan, and although there is no social security or provident fund, there is a commission of 10%-20%, and there is no upper limit on the commission. After joining the company, he found many suspicious points: During the 7-day trial period, Zhou Jun was learning a book of words, which taught him how to disguise himself as a Japanese woman to attract users to join the group; there was no contract signed for the work, the company name was unclear, colleagues did not know their real names, and called each other by pseudonyms or English names; the office used an overseas server, the work group was built on the external network, and the work mobile phone was also equipped with an overseas mobile phone card; wages were usually paid in cash, and there would be bundles of cash at the closing time, "some people received more than 100,000 cash at a time, either deposited it in batches in the bank, or bought gold."

Zhou Jun also found that most of the other colleagues were from the same hometown, classmates or friends, and some looked like they had just reached adulthood. At that time, there was only Zhou Jun, who found this company on an online recruitment platform, and the recruitment position was described as "customer service sales for cross-border e-commerce." More than a year later, Zhou Jun said that he could no longer find the company's recruitment information at the time.

Zhou Jun studied engineering in college, and his ideal career path was to work in a factory as an industrial worker, dealing with machinery and equipment. But he wanted to work in an office, and since he had passed the CET-4, he wanted to try foreign trade. Positions without professional thresholds, such as operations, customer service, and sales, were just right for him.

Not long after submitting his resume, the above-mentioned company invited Zhou Jun to an interview. The company is small, with only about 20 people. The ceiling is hung with colorful flags of different countries. The office is full of young men typing away, occupying a small cubicle in the Tianhui Building. The interviewer didn't ask many questions, including whether Zhou Jun understood cross-border trade and whether he would use overseas social accounts. After submitting his ID information, he was quickly hired.

This company has a "special chat department" and a "contract department". Zhou Jun first went to the "special chat department", which required one-on-one chatting with foreigners. However, after the probation period ended, he was worried about being directly involved in fraud, so he chose to transfer to the "contract department" and became a "shill" in the private chat software WhatsApp group, responsible for fanning the flames and encouraging users to recharge the App, and received a fixed salary of 4,000 yuan per month.

The "contract department" is more like casting a wide net. There are special staff who pull the phone numbers bought from upstream suppliers or users who come to consult through advertising into the WhatsApp group. Each group has about 300 people, and they have pulled about 100 groups. Zhou Jun also got a new "talking book". His new persona is an investor. He creates an atmosphere in the group and tells others that he has received a lot of returns by following the investment experts in the App. But in fact, the investment expert who claimed to be from Morgan Stanley was Zhou Jun's colleague, and the App was maintained by another colleague. The company behind the App was just a shell company registered in Ontario, Canada for account transfer, and only the boss could see how much money users invested in the App.

Compared with the higher commission of "Jingliao", the commission of the "Contract" department is slightly lower, at 20%. Both departments eventually need to introduce potential victims to the App. As for when to "kill", it is decided by the team leader. Zhou Jun had experienced it not long after he came. When the "Killing Foreign Plate" closed, the boss invited everyone in the department to have a meal at a late-night snack stall near the company as a celebration. "There are 3 bitcoins in the background. According to the price of 60,000 US dollars per bitcoin at the time, it seems that more than one million yuan (RMB) was collected."

When it comes to closing or cash, Zhou Jun will feel that all this is "too exaggerated." Worried about the high risks behind high returns, he originally planned to find a new job after the 2024 Spring Festival. However, one night in March, a group of strangers suddenly came to the office and asked the boss to come forward to coordinate the problem of "unequal distribution of spoils" in the team, otherwise they would call the police. Later, the group really called the police. On the same day, except for the boss who did not come to the office, everyone else was taken to the police station.

Because he was only a grassroots employee and the evidence was insufficient to convict him, Zhou Jun was released from the police station after less than 24 hours. Since then, he has completely left the company and changed his phone card, hoping to say goodbye to this experience, "just like waking up from a dream."

Inside Tianhui Building. (Photographed by Southern Weekend reporter Wang Xuqiulin)

2 “It felt strange, and I didn’t dare to ask more questions”

What Zhou Jun experienced was a typical model of “killing foreign stocks”: in a fake investment system, the victim is given a false illusion of profit, and the victim is encouraged to invest as much money as possible.

Clara, a Chinese American, is a victim of this model. In 2023, she met an "investor" on the social platform LinkedIn, and was introduced to a website for investing in virtual currencies, thinking that she could make profits by trading there. Clara told the Southern Weekend reporter that she had invested in Bitcoin and knew how to operate it. She had invested 3 Bitcoins until she found that she could not withdraw the profits on the fake website. "They are just deceiving people like us who seem to know more and think they will not be deceived."

In addition to false investments, the model of "killing foreign plates" to defraud victims of money also includes setting up capital plates overseas, as well as part-time jobs and order-brushing that are common in "killing pig plates".

The capital plate is also called the "mutual aid plate". The trader promises profits and constantly attracts people to "invest". The investment of new people is used to fill the interest of old investors until it collapses. It is essentially a Ponzi scheme. The Southern Weekend reporter contacted Aqiang (pseudonym) in the name of peer communication. He said that he had done this model of "killing foreign plates" in the past few years.

Before April 2024, his team had worked on capital pools in India, South Africa and Nigeria. "(Participants) calculate the money based on the closing balance, (the model) is like a pyramid, and you have to recruit people." Aqiang remembers that there were about 1,000 participants in the South African market and about 13,000 in the Indian market. As a grassroots salesperson, he can get a 10% commission at the time of settlement for every order he pulls.

Unlike Aqiang's active participation, some practitioners have mistakenly entered the "foreign killing market".

"I will post photos that are a little bit off and share my life." In September 2023, college graduate Chang Xu (pseudonym) joined a cross-border e-commerce company as a "traffic diversion customer service." Chang Xu is also an engineering student, and his employment considerations are similar to Zhou Jun. After joining the company, the company issued him 5 mobile phones and asked him to manage accounts on Instagram and Facebook.

Chang Xu told the Southern Weekend reporter that these accounts were previously controlled by the company, and the characters were all young, wealthy white women from Europe. Every day, he posted a few photos provided by the company, just like managing a circle of friends. Whenever a user took the initiative to like or chat privately, he would chat with the other party according to the "script book" and ask the other party to add the WhatsApp account controlled by the company's "sales department."

For every user added by the sales department, Chang Xu would get a commission. But he didn't know what products the company was selling. He asked the manager, but the other party's answer was always vague. "It felt strange to do this every day, a bit like fraud, so I stopped doing it, but I didn't dare to ask more questions."

If the sales department was engaged in telecommunications fraud, Chang Xu's "traffic diversion" work would be what is commonly known as "powder business" in the industry, suspected of assisting information network criminal activities or fraud. This was beyond his cognition, "I never thought I could be arrested for going to work."

Southern Weekend reporters found that in the "Shayangpan" criminal network, companies will strictly control grassroots employees to know more about the organization, and employees will be assigned to complete single, repetitive tasks, while more resources are controlled by upper-level managers. "Grassroots employees are like criminal tools." Li Fei (pseudonym), a practitioner familiar with "Shayangpan" and related industrial chains, said.

Zhou Jun learned at work that if someone did a good job, they could "go out and work on their own", which meant that he could set up a new fraud team, share the original operating platform, and give commissions to the company. Zhou Jun's direct supervisor was codenamed "Micheal", who managed the company's affairs. Micheal's superior was the boss "Brother Li", and he only contacted Micheal and rarely appeared in the office. "As for the superior of Brother Li, we can only hear about it from hearsay, and it is said that he contacted people in northern Myanmar."

This situation was confirmed by Aqiang. He said that he and the company's boss were from the same hometown, but the boss also had a superior. "It is said that he (the boss's superior) learned this set (referring to "killing foreign plates") after returning from northern Myanmar. He did not do it himself, but only acted as an agent for drawing some money, and invested in many plates at the same time." Aqiang had not seen this superior very often, and only saw that once the boss exchanged Tether and asked him to exchange cash in person.

Aqiang loves to make money and wants to make money. He said he also wants to go abroad to continue doing this business, but he has no connections and no one to take him abroad. In the comment section of some social platforms, there are always some accounts that leave messages like "please take me" or "please give me directions" under pages discussing scams such as "killing foreign plates".

Southern Weekend reporters left messages to these accounts in the name of job-seeking students, asking for their ideas. One account replied: "I don't have enough resources. (You) go to a company and work there first, accumulate experience, and when your colleagues leave, ask them which company they will work for and whether it is a good job, and then you will have more choices." When asked what to do if this kind of work involves breaking the law, the other party replied that it is a risk issue, "If you are caught, you will be arrested."

Lawyer Long Yi of Hunan Yingqi Law Firm met with the parties involved in "killing foreigners" in the detention center, and felt that they had a kind of "lucky and evasiveness." Long Yi concluded that most of these parties were grassroots personnel in criminal organizations, born in rural areas, young, with ordinary family conditions and low education. Many parties even had the wrong idea that "cheating foreigners' money is not illegal" and "this is a patriotic act."

3 Difficult to report and obtain evidence

Lawyer Deng Kai of Guangdong Nanfang Fred Law Firm has represented many "killing foreigners" cases. In his opinion, some fraudsters have formed a path dependence of engaging in black and gray industries, but in recent years, domestic telecommunications fraud has become increasingly difficult, so they have changed the routines originally used to defraud Chinese people and used them on foreigners. Unlike the "pig killing plate", the victims of the "foreign killing plate" are difficult to report to the domestic police because they are abroad. Therefore, the clues of such cases often come from the active investigation of public security organs or reports from internal employees.

Deng Kai analyzed that in judicial practice, "killing foreigners" faces the dilemma of difficulty in obtaining evidence: "Without the victim's report, it is difficult to prove that they (referring to the victim) were deceived rather than voluntarily. It is also difficult to trace the use of virtual currency by both parties during the fraud. Some criminals will deliberately delete chat records regularly, change office locations, trading platforms and payment accounts, so even if some companies have been in business for a long time, it may be difficult to find out the specific amount involved."

On the Judgment Documents Network, more than 40 judgments can be retrieved using the keywords "killing foreigners" and "fraudulent foreigners". They come from grassroots courts in Fujian, Hunan, Guangxi, Shandong and other provinces. Some of these gangs commit crimes abroad, while others commit crimes in China. Compared with overseas electronic fraud parks, domestic fraud companies are small in scale, usually with no more than 20 people in a company.

The earliest case came from Dao County, Hunan Province in 2019, where 14 people led by Jiang Mou defrauded 55 foreigners of a total of 519,000 US dollars on the pretext of following an "investment expert" to invest in virtual currency.

After 2022, the common name of "killing foreign plates" began to appear in legal documents. The behavior of criminal gangs has also shown new changes: the scope of influence is larger. In one case, there may be thousands or even tens of thousands of foreigners who have received fraudulent information; the amount of fraud is larger, and the amount of fraud found in some cases can reach tens of millions of yuan; the target range is wider, and the victims are located in Japan, South Korea, India, the United States, Nigeria and other countries. But on the other hand, the testimony of the victims may not be seen in these documents, and some sentences are also convicted of the defendant based on the number of messages sent.

Deng Kai explained that this is also related to the difficulty in obtaining some evidence during the investigation of such cases. "When the number of messages sent and the number of phone calls are used to convict, the court will determine that it is an attempted crime, and such people will be sentenced relatively lightly, but if the amount of their profit can be found out, they can be sentenced to a heavier level."

Three final judgments made by the Chongqing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court in 2024 outline the general outline of the "Shayangpan" scam. The scam in the case began in February 2022 and the case occurred in March 2023. In a year, the organization used three fake trading platforms to attract Indian victims to consult and invest, and finally defrauded more than 40 million yuan in money.

The person who received the most commission was the platform party, reaching 40%. His task is to provide an online platform, fraudulent rhetoric, and to convert the foreign currency obtained from the fraud into RMB and transfer it to the domestic fund settlement channel. The verdict shows that the platform personnel lived in Hubei in February 2022, using a pseudonym, and had not yet appeared in court as of December 2024.

The second-ranked shareholder is an accomplice in the case. He usually connects with the platform party and holds a 25% stake. In this case, his task is to recruit and organize people to commit fraud, and lead a team to the Hubei platform party to learn how to commit fraud.

The team manager is the third largest shareholder, holding a 15% stake. He recruits and organizes personnel with the second shareholder, and is responsible for the daily management of the team. In addition, the team has several shareholders who are responsible for logistics support and management of salesmen, holding 3%-5% of the shares.

Over a year, new people continued to join, and the entire organization split: under the contact and invitation of the second and third shareholders, the three people began to learn the model and skills of fraud and formed three new teams. These three teams shared the fake trading platform with the original team. In the new team, the two shareholders could own 12.5%-15% of the shares, and these three new teams defrauded Indian nationals of a total of more than 10.2 million yuan.

In April 2025, Southern Weekend reporters contacted several defense lawyers in the case, but as of press time, no response was received from the other party.

Guo Yue, a lawyer at Henan Jiansu Law Firm, told Southern Weekend reporters that in the "Killing Foreign Plate" criminal organization, the real leaders and upstream personnel are difficult to track down because they are generally connected through anonymous social software whose true identities are difficult to trace. When the criminal den is shut down, those caught are usually grassroots employees. They may make relatively little profit, but they still have to bear the corresponding compensation liability and accept legal sanctions.

"The criminal chain is fine and professional, the crimes are highly collaborative and the division of labor is clear, forming a fraud crime group with division of labor, mutual dependence and shared interests." Shandong Heze Court summarized the behavioral characteristics of "Killing Foreign Plate" in its notice in April 2025.

4 Evading tracking and strengthening supervision

The circulation of virtual currency between different platforms and countries also makes crime more difficult to track.

After being cheated in the United States, Clara wanted to sue the platform that tracked Bitcoin in the United States, apply to freeze the corresponding account, and get back the defrauded property, but she was unsuccessful. In 2025, she and the other 150 victims are going to file a case in the UK. These victims come from different countries such as the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, and some have even been defrauded of more than one million US dollars. Clara said that the defrauded virtual currency went through different platforms and dozens of electronic wallets, and some were mixed with legal virtual currencies. "It is useless to find out how the money circulated and where it went. The problem is how to get it back."

Southern Weekend reporters learned from Li Fei, Deng Kai and an anti-fraud volunteer that the upstream and downstream of "killing foreign plates" actually involve more industries: registration and sale of overseas social accounts, opening and sale of phone cards, development and packaging of fraud apps and platforms, acquisition of "personality" photos, online and offline advertising and customer acquisition, theft and leakage of overseas users' personal information, opening of overseas companies and bank accounts, money laundering and cash exchange, etc.

In recent years, under China's zero-tolerance attitude against telecommunications fraud, some key members of the team have begun to travel to other countries to evade supervision and tracking, and sometimes recruit locals to form fraud teams.

According to information released by the Nigerian Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), in December 2024, the EFCC arrested a cryptocurrency investment and romance fraud gang. Among the 792 suspects arrested, 148 were Chinese citizens, 40 Filipinos, 1 Kazakh, 1 Pakistani and 1 Indonesian.

The EFCC said that foreign gangs recruited Nigerians locally, equipped them with WhatsApp accounts linked to European phone numbers, and used phishing to find victims online. The main targets of the fraud were Americans, Canadians, Mexicans and Europeans. At present, the leader of the group is still at large.

In January 2025, the case entered the trial stage. The suspects appeared in court one after another for various crimes such as suspected fraud, possession of false documents, identity theft, and money laundering.

The Chinese Embassy in Nigeria has also paid attention to this case. In a meeting with the Chairman of the EFCC in March 2025, the Chinese Ambassador to Nigeria stated that law enforcement cooperation is an important part of the relationship between the two countries, and China is willing to work with Nigeria to strengthen law enforcement exchanges and cooperation and jointly combat online gambling fraud and cross-border crimes.

A few months after leaving the "Foreign Trade Company", Zhou Jun heard that another "foreign plate killing" gang was arrested by the police in Tianhui Building. He was glad that he got out in time, but this experience still became a secret "like a stain" in his heart. Later, Zhou Jun found a job that fits his major and returned to the factory in the Pearl River Delta to become an industrial worker. The new job still requires day and night reversal, and the intensity is much greater than before, but Zhou Jun is very satisfied: there is a contract, social security, provident fund, and most importantly, "return to normal life."

In April 2024, Aqiang's boss heard the news and stopped. Aqiang said that he had asked several times over the past year, but the other party said that the situation was tight and did not continue.