The students were coerced into taking part in the scam. Credit:Victoria Police But the girl was the victim of a scam. She had been coerced into taking part in the elaborate ruse involving an organised crime syndicate, an offshore call centre and a cast of actors targeting, mostly, the many thousands of Chinese in Australia. Some victims were threatened with deportation. Credit:Victoria Police IDCARE, a national cyber security support service, has had more than 700 calls for help since October. In Melbourne, there have been 32 victims since December that police know of. That’s more than one a week. Twenty-two of them have sent money and about $3 million has been extorted in total. Most of them are students who are threatened with deportation or some kind of criminal punishment.

“It sounds outrageous. But it’s happening all the time,” Victoria Police Detective Superintendent Pat Boyle said. “The absolute fear they cause is incredible.” In another case, a student was told his credit card owed $400,000 and he was linked to Chinese criminals. Someone purporting to be a policeman, who seemingly called from a Chinese police department on a spoofed number, told him he needed to get a new phone as his was no longer secure. The student was then told to check in to a Frankston hotel room and, because he had no money, he needed to send photos in which he looked like he had been kidnapped.

The scheme was building to a point where his parents would have been sent the photos if the young man hadn’t "broken the rules" and contacted his father himself, who told him it was a scam. Henry Foo, a 24-year-old IT graduate living in Melbourne, received a call like this last Thursday from what he was told was the Chinese embassy in Sydney. He was told a package with his name on it had been intercepted and 70 fake credit cards were inside. They transferred him to a police department in China who started to mine him for information, such as his passport number, before he was informed he was caught-up in a criminal banking case and sent him a phoney warrant. “They kept on saying if I don’t co-operate with them they are going to take me back to Beijing and lock me up,” Mr Foo told The Age. Victims were told to tie themselves up and take photos. Credit:Victoria Police

“I thought this was real. I was terrified. They told me I couldn’t tell anyone, not even my parents.” To verify his bank account to the court so he could prove he wasn't involved, Mr Foo was told he must send $100,000 in Chinese yuan. But because he didn’t have the money, he started asking his friends and his uncle before they assured him it was a scam. “I feel stupid,” Mr Foo said. “But I wanted to tell people so they can be aware of this kind of thing.” Superintedent Boyle said it's likely the calls originate from China or Taiwan, from a call centre run by organised crime groups.

He said the callers sit in a room with a script that they pass around as the scam escalates and the call is “transferred” from the Chinese embassy, to Chinese police, to Chinese prosecutors. “The victims are vulnerable. They’re not with their family. They’re naive, in fear of authorities in their own country and also, enough facts are put behind it to make it sound so believable,” Superintendent Boyle said. It’s hard to say how the syndicate has the phone numbers. In some cases, the scammers already have the name of the person they’re ringing but it’s more likely they are calling random mobiles in the hope of striking a Chinese or Mandarin-speaking victim. IDCARE's David Lacey said a similar scam hit Singapore in 2016-17, and it is now in Australia and New Zealand. Most of the calls, he said, begin with a pre-recorded message that asks them to press a number to continue. “They want to scare people, they want to create a sense of absolute fear that you feel like there is no other option,” Mr Lacey said.