By Ethan Wang and Ryan Woo
BEIJING (Reuters) – A Chinese mother went on television to seek justice for her 19-year-old mentally disabled son after scammers tricked the desperate job seeker into having a breast enlargement, an incident that has sparked widespread outrage.
The teenager, who hoped to get a job at a cosmetic surgery clinic in the central city of Wuhan, was told the procedure would help him make money by gaining followers through livestreaming.
The clinic even convinced him to borrow 30,000 yuan ($4,180) to pay for the operation, his mother told a television station last week.
“For the sake of money, one can give up one’s humanity,” said one of more than 2,600 comments on Chinese social media platform Weibo (NASDAQ:), where posts about the boy’s fate have been viewed more than 27 million times.
“Worse than animals!” said another.
The mother, with the help of the TV channel and lawyers, managed to get the loan canceled, but the breast surgery had already been done.
Scams such as recruitment for non-existent jobs, false advertising and lending traps are on the rise in China as the economy falters. The top judicial prosecutor said last year that scammers were targeting more students and recent graduates.
A record 11.79 million students graduated this summer as the world’s second-largest economy grapples with one crisis after another, from a trade war and the aftermath of COVID-19 to a prolonged real estate crisis and cautious consumer spending.
A jobs crisis among young people could test the economic leadership of the ruling Communist Party, which has repeatedly urged people to “listen to the party.”
Finding jobs for young people is a top priority, President Xi Jinping said this year, expressing concern about their employment prospects.
FALSE PROMISES
Youth unemployment hit a record high of 21.3% in June last year, prompting China to halt publication of the closely watched benchmark and say students still enrolled should be excluded.
There is no way to track all job seekers aged 16 to 24, but a spokesperson for the National Bureau of Statistics said last year that 33 million of them were looking for work.
“The pressure on employment still exists,” Liu Aihua, a spokesman for the statistics bureau, told a news conference on Thursday, after data showed China’s overall unemployment rate rose to the highest level in four months in July.
“Key groups are still under pressure (in finding work).”
In another scam that made headlines last month, a student looking for a part-time job in food delivery was persuaded to sign a one-year contract to rent an electric bicycle.
A bicycle rental store employee posing as a recruiter for the popular meal delivery service Meituan told the student he needed to rent a bicycle before he could get started.
A few weeks later, the student realized that his earnings were far below the “tens of thousands” promised by the “recruiter”, and that he could barely meet the monthly rent.
“It’s hard enough to find a job, and now we also have to be careful about scams,” said a Weibo poster.
Authorities say the bleak job prospects have driven some students to become fraudsters themselves.
In the first ten months of 2023, there was an annual increase of 68% in the number of young people under the age of 18 prosecuted for telephone and internet scams, the Public Prosecution Service said last November.
The number of young graduates with higher university degrees joining scam syndicates also increased, a report said.
The Wuhan teenager’s trauma was compounded by having to go under the knife for a second time to remove breast implants, his mother said on television.
“It pains me to see the two scars under my son’s chest,” she added.
($1=7.1735 renminbi)
