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Young and indebted, 700 Chinese women made to prostitute and sell ova

蘋果日報 2020/12/13 06:41


The criminal convictions of a loan shark and his gang are casting the spotlight on crooks who force female loan defaulters into prostitution, in a case said to be just the tip of the iceberg of an overly indebted young generation in China.
Wen Chen, who has been sentenced to life in jail, has filed an appeal along with his fellow gangsters, all of whom have been found guilty of making as many as 700 women take naked photos, become prostitutes or sell their ova.
The gang, operating in the central city of Wuhan, targeted young good-looking women working in nightclubs and karaoke pubs. They started offering the women quick unsecured loans in March 2017, and by March 2019, when they were arrested, the gang had granted 1,100 loans totaling more than 10 million yuan.
Some of the debtors were talked into stripping for photos as “collateral” for their loans. Twenty-year-old Xiao Nan (not her real name) agreed to borrow 10,000 yuan for one month and to pay a daily interest of 200 yuan, with a default fee of 1,000 yuan per day. The day Xiao Nan signed the deal, Wen immediately charged her a 3,000 yuan service fee and made her take a naked picture as a pledge for the loan.
When Xiao Nan defaulted, Wen threatened to mail the image to her family unless she agreed to sign another agreement, to sleep with a man for 40,000 yuan to pay off her loan.
Another victim, Xiao Fei (not her real name), took 38,000 yuan from Wen but signed a contract stipulating the loan size was 85,000 yuan. Upon defaulting, she had to walk naked into the Xiang River with the whole process caught on video. The gang then took Xiao Fei to different cities to work as a prostitute, and eventually forced her to sell her eggs at a clinic in Wuhan.
In May, Wen and his gang were convicted of triad participation, fraud, forced prostitution, illegal detention and other offenses. Their appeals are being heard in court.
The crackdown is just the tip of the iceberg of young Chinese residents relying too much on money that is not their own. Apart from illegal loan agents, young people can easily take out loans at online credit platforms such as Jiebei and Huabei under Ant Financial, or from peer-to-peer lending channels.
Economist Law Ka-chung said that the popularity of loan products among young Chinese had to do with the wider economic environment.
In the past decade or so, economic growth on the mainland had slowed and young people had seen fewer job opportunities, Law said. Graduates might borrow money to start their own business when they could not find a job, but it would be difficult to get a loan from traditional banks. So, these young people would turn to web platforms or illegal channels for money, Law said.
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