Scammers are preying on young Chinese desperate for jobs in a slumping economy By Reuters

By Ethan Wang and Ryan Woo

BEIJING (Reuters) – A Chinese mother has gone on television to demand justice for her 19-year-old intellectually disabled son after scammers tricked the desperate job seeker into undergoing breast augmentation surgery, in an incident that has sparked widespread outrage.

The teenager hoping to get 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 livestreams.

The clinic even persuaded him to borrow 30,000 yuan ($4,180) to pay for the surgery, his mother told a television station last week.

“For 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 attracted more than 27 million views.

“Worse than beasts!” said another.

The mother managed to get the loan cancelled, with the help of the television network and lawyers, but the breast surgery had already been performed.

In China, as the economy falters, scams such as recruiting for non-existent jobs, false advertising and loan traps are on the rise, and the top law enforcement body said last year that criminals were targeting more students and recent graduates.

A record 11.79 million students graduated this summer as the world's second-largest economy faces one crisis after another, from a trade war and the fallout from COVID-19 to a prolonged housing crisis and cautious consumer spending.

A youth jobs crisis 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, while expressing concern about their employment prospects.

FALSE PROMISES

Youth unemployment hit a record 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 spokesman for the Office for National Statistics said last year that 33 million of them were looking for work.

“Employment pressure still exists,” Liu Aihua, a spokesman for the statistics bureau, said at a news conference on Thursday, after data showed China's overall jobless rate rose to a four-month high in July.

“Key groups still face pressure (to find work).”

In another scam that made headlines last month, a college student looking for a part-time job delivering food was persuaded to sign 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 had to rent a bicycle before starting work.

A few weeks later, the student realized that his earnings were far below the “tens of thousands” promised by the “recruiter” and he could barely make ends meet.

“It's hard enough finding a job, and now we have to be careful of scams too,” said one Weibo user.

Authorities say increasingly bleak employment prospects have led some students to turn to scammers.

The first 10 months of 2023 saw a 68% annual increase in the number of minors under 18 being prosecuted for telephone and internet scams, the prosecutor's office said last November.

Incidents of young graduates with advanced university degrees joining fraudster syndicates have also increased, it added in a report.

The Wuhan teenager's trauma was compounded by having to undergo surgery 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.

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