Anika Begay
By Ethan Wang and Ryan Woo
BEIJING (Reuters) – A Chinese mother has appeared on television to demand justice for her intellectually disabled 19-year-old son after scammers tricked the desperate unemployed man into undergoing breast augmentation surgery, in an incident that has sparked outrage.
The teenager who hoped to land a job at a cosmetic surgery clinic in the central city of Wuhan was told the procedure would help him earn money by gaining followers through live streaming.
The clinic even persuaded him to take out a loan of 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,” read one of more than 2,600 comments on Chinese social media platform Weibo (NASDAQ:), where posts about the boy’s plight have garnered more than 27 million views.
“Worse than beasts!” said another.
The mother managed to have the loan cancelled with the help of the TV station and lawyers, but the breast surgery had already been performed.
As China’s economy falters, scams such as job placement, false advertising and loan traps are on the rise; last year, the country’s top law enforcement agency said scammers were increasingly targeting 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 the trade war to the fallout from COVID-19 to a prolonged housing crisis and cautious consumer spending.
An employment crisis among young people could test the economic leadership of the ruling Communist Party, which has repeatedly called on 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 21.3 percent in June last year, prompting China to suspend publication of the closely watched benchmark, saying students still enrolled should be excluded.
It is not possible to track all jobseekers aged 16 to 24, but a spokeswoman for the Office for National Statistics said last year that 33 million of them were looking for work.
“The pressure on employment still exists,” Liu Aihua, a spokeswoman for the statistics bureau, said at a news conference on Thursday, after data showed China’s overall unemployment rate hit its highest level in four months in July.
“Key groups continue to face pressure (to find jobs).”
In another scam that made headlines last month, a college student looking for part-time work as a delivery driver was tricked into signing a one-year contract to rent an electric bike.
A bicycle rental shop employee posing as a recruiter for popular food delivery service Meituan told the student he would have to rent a bicycle before starting the job.
A few weeks later, the student realized that his earnings were well below the “tens of thousands” promised by the “recruiter” and that he could barely pay his monthly rent.
“It’s hard enough to find a job, now we have to be careful about scams too,” said one Weibo user.
Authorities say the increasingly bleak job outlook has pushed some students to turn to fraudsters themselves.
The first 10 months of 2023 saw a 68 percent annual increase in the number of minors under 18 prosecuted for telephone and Internet fraud, prosecutors said last November.
There has also been an increase in cases of young graduates with advanced degrees joining scam organizations, a report said.
The Wuhan teenager’s trauma was compounded by having to go under the knife a second time to remove her breast implants, her mother said on television.
“It hurts me to see the two scars under my son’s chest,” she added.
($1=7.1735 renminbi)
