A 10-month police crackdown on bogus callers and rogue traders across Guangdong province means little to a resident of the provincial capital who was tricked into handing over her life savings to scammers last month.

The resident of Guangzhou's Yuexiu district received a call from a man claiming to be from a telephone company, saying she had run up a massive phone bill.

When she said she had never made the calls, she was told her identity might have been stolen before the phone call was transferred to a "police hotline".

The scammers, now pretending to be cops, convinced her to transfer all her savings to a new bank account they provided in order to protect her money.

The woman wired a whopping 2.48 million yuan to that account and never saw it again.

The police are "still investigating the case".

Cold-calling criminals have duped residents of Guangdong province of more than 80 million yuan ($11.71 million) in just three months this year.

Police in the south China province who launched a crackdown on the crime early this year yesterday claimed to have busted "63 gangs involved in 468 acts of telephone fraud" in the first three months.

Cops have detained a total of "379 suspects and seized a number of computers, mobile phone and bank cards", besides freezing assets worth more than 10 million yuan during the crackdown, which ends in October.

Residents who have been lucky enough to escape the frauds are hoping the cops work harder to introduce "more concrete and effective measures" to fight the crime, which continues to dupe vulnerable citizens of their hard-earned cash.

Liang Weifa, director-general of the provincial department of public security, has ordered officers across the province to "do what they can and must to crackdown on crime and rigorously investigate the cases".

Liang yesterday urged local residents to beware of scammers trying to cheat them and "report the frauds to the police".

(China Daily June 23, 2009)