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Twenty-one people have been convicted by a court in Hebei Province in connection with the murder of four miners in a scam to collect compensation money.

The killings followed the plot of the 2003 Chinese film “Blind Shaft,” in which con men kill workers and then claim to be family members to extort mine owners. In the decade since the film came out, there have been a handful of similar incidents in China, and the brutal schemes have come to be known as “Blind Shaft cases.”

The Handan Intermediate People’s Court handed down death sentences on Thursday for five of the accused, and the remaining defendants were given prison terms of up to 15 years, the court announced on its Sina Weibo microblog.



The authorities say the defendants, who were mostly from Sichuan Province, recruited men to work under false names in Hebei mines. They beat to death four men while they worked underground, fabricated evidence to make the deaths look like workplace accidents and then claimed to be relatives of the deceased to receive compensation money, the court said. They reportedly extorted 1.8 million renminbi, or nearly $300,000, in 2011 and 2012.

One of the accused, a 35-year-old woman named Wang Zhengxiu, befriended a target, 31-year-old Li Zihua, and urged him to take up a job as a miner, the Guangdong-based South Reviews magazine reported in July. The scam began to fall apart after Mr. Li was killed in 2012 when a group of the suspects beat him to death and then detonated explosives near his body to make his death appear accidental. The mine owners called the police because the people who claimed to be the dead man’s family seemed suspicious. The police later said the suspects did not seem sad, showed little interest in the cause of their loved one’s death and were quick to lower their compensation demands to end the matter quickly, the magazine reported.

China’s mines are notoriously dangerous, with more than 1,049 reported deaths in coal mines alone last year. Labor advocates say the pressure to reduce fatalities means that not all mine accidents are reported. And some mines operate illegally, adding to the pressure to cover up workplace incidents. Those factors all help criminals pull off the murder-for-compensation scam.

The mines of Liangwa village in Henan Province saw at least three such cases between 2005 and 2007.

In 2009, four people in Beijing were convicted in the death of a man in an illegal mine in the city’s Fangshan District. The mine owner refused to compensate them and fled. The suspects then sought to report the fabricated “mine accident” to the local government, at which point their story began to collapse.

Three men were convicted by a court in Zhejiang Province in 2011 of throwing another mine worker down an elevator shaft. The chief suspect, Yu Yong, was sentenced to death.

But he denied taking any inspiration from the film. “The idea to kill someone, pretend to be his kin and swindle the boss, that came at random,” Mr. Yu told a court in Wenzhou.