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A woman in Xiangtan, Hunan discovered her savings were gone when a 7-yuan breakfast payment failed: scammers had silently cancelled her bank's SMS alerts, redeemed her funds and moved the money to Hong Kong in digital yuan over six days. Banks and courts say the alert-quieting trick is now a standard part of the fraud playbook.
The woman — surnamed Zhou, from Xiangtan in China’s central Hunan province — found out that nearly 260,000 yuan had vanished from her bank account the way many people discover such things: a payment failed. She was buying a 7-yuan breakfast and her balance came up short. When she checked her account at a China Construction Bank branch, she found the money had been moved out in multiple transfers over six days, the largest single one for 131,315.8 yuan.
The detail that made her case a national trending topic was the first step of the theft: at 3:03 a.m. on October 17, her bank’s SMS alerts were cancelled. From that moment, every transfer out of her account was silent. She saw no text messages, no notifications, no warnings — for six days, while the fraudsters redeemed her funds and moved the money out, converting it into digital yuan, exchanging it for Hong Kong dollars and wiring it to Hong Kong.
Bank staff told her the scheme showed a practiced hand: cancel the alerts first, then log in to her banking app, redeem her fund holdings and transfer out her fixed deposits, then open a digital-yuan wallet and use its currency exchange to move the money abroad. Zhou said she had never answered scam calls, never given anyone a verification code or authorization, and never clicked an unknown link. She has reported the case to the police, who are investigating how her phone was compromised — she recalled that one night her phone had gone dark and flickered uncontrollably, as if being controlled remotely.
The alert-quieting trick is not new, and it is the reason Chinese courts have repeatedly ruled against banks in cases like this one. In a case cited widely on Chinese social media this week, a Shanghai court held that a bank could not simply point to "matching verification information" to claim a customer had authorized the transfers: fraudsters intercepting verification codes is a criminal method, the court found, and cannot be used to infer the depositor leaked anything. The bank was ordered to compensate the customer in full. In another, a Henan court split liability 50-50 after a bank failed to send any alert for 179 consecutive transactions on a card that never left its owner’s pocket — while noting that cardholders who fail to freeze their accounts after an anomaly bear the later losses themselves.
The lesson Chinese commenters took from the case was not about how to spot a scam call — Zhou never answered one — but about the fact that the modern version leaves no calls to spot. "Check your account the moment your phone does anything strange," one post warned, "and freeze it if anything looks wrong." The Ministry of Public Security’s standing advice is the same: verify before transferring, and call 110 or the 96110 anti-fraud line the moment money is gone.
10 Nov 2026
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