China: A shocking story was reported in China as a 21-year-old man identified as Jiang, was arrested there for running an elaborate scam involving hotels. Jiang’s operating procedure is to check into luxury hotels, deliberately planting in them disturbing items such as dead cockroaches, used condoms, cicadas, and strands of hair, before lodging complaints about the unsanitary conditions of hotels.
According to the South China Morning Post, this brilliant scam, initiated when Jiang had depleted his savings in college, was one that took 10 months and successfully extorted $5,200 from 63 hotels. Jiang’s scam spree was always for people who brazenly entered hotels in the afternoon to multiple bookings in a single day; exploited minute flaws to intimidate establishments with threats of lodging complaints or airing issues in public.
The game was however changed when one of the hotels he had attempted to scam reported him to the police.
A police officer from Linhai in Zhejiang stated that, “Over a span of 10 months, Jiang frequently stayed at hotels, sometimes checking into three or four different ones in a single day. He would exploit minor flaws or plant insects, bugs, and hair to threaten hotels with complaints or online exposure, demanding free stays or compensation.”
This resulted in an investigation that indicated that Jiang had slept in more than 300 hotels where he would be using his sinister ways of deceiving and extorting money from these unsuspecting houses. The police found 23 packets of those abhorrent things with which he was to present his con at a local hotel and detained him.
