According to CCTV News, the Luyao police in Zhejiang have dismantled a gang that used an AI voice system to commit fraud. In just two months, over a thousand people were deceived, with the case involving more than ten million yuan in transactions. Currently, 30 suspects have been arrested.
In July of this year, Mr. Wang from Luyao wanted to raise money for his child's summer tutoring classes and received a call from someone claiming to be a business agent from a loan platform. The person accurately mentioned his loan records and promised to increase his credit limit. After Mr. Wang borrowed 15,500 yuan through a legitimate platform, the caller falsely claimed that 5,500 yuan was "capital provider funding" and needed to be returned to a designated account. Seeing Mr. Wang comply, they then encouraged him to take loans from multiple platforms. When Mr. Wang tried to stop, the caller fabricated a story about transferring 10,000 yuan to the company account to repay the debt and then receiving another 10,000 credit limit. However, after the money arrived, he found that his platform debt had not decreased at all, so he reported it to the police.
A single computer makes millions in outgoing calls, victims are classified into A, B, C, D, F levels
After receiving the report, the Luyao police located the operation site within five days in a high-end office building near a subway station in Changsha. At first glance, it looked like a legitimate company, with internal divisions into personnel, call center, and technical groups. Officer Ye Jie from the investigation team reconstructed the scheme: the group first used AI robots to attract customers, then handed them over to real people for collection. Suspects only needed to pay on the AI platform to obtain dynamic account credentials, import illegal phone number databases, and set time frames and frequencies. With a regular computer, the system could automatically make mass outbound calls. Calls were concentrated between 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. and 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., making over 200,000 calls per day. Anyone showing interest would be marked as "valid leads" and seamlessly transferred to human operators.
More refined was the AI system’s classification of people by keywords into six categories: those who added WeChat and were accepted, those who added but were not accepted, those who did not need it, those who were emotional, those who were unclearly identified, and those who did not meet the criteria, each being followed up accordingly. The gang also targeted legitimate users’ refund requests from formal online lending platforms — these were legally refundable amounts, but the gang falsely claimed to help retrieve them to build trust. The police pointed out that most victims were people in financial difficulty, such as recent college graduates and elderly individuals.
At present, over one million yuan has been frozen, and more than 100 pieces of tools used in the crime have been seized. All 30 suspects have been taken under criminal compulsory measures for suspicion of fraud and the investigation is ongoing. AI has drastically reduced the cost of "casting a wide net," providing a more hidden pipeline for fraud schemes.
