By Ethan Wang and Ryan Wu
BEIJING (Reuters) – A Chinese mother has taken to television to demand justice for her 19-year-old mentally disabled son after con artists tricked the desperate job seeker into having breast enlargement surgery in an incident that sparked widespread outrage.
The teenager, who was hoping to get a job at a plastic surgery clinic in the central city of Wuhan, was told the procedure would help him earn money by gaining followers through livestreams.
His mother told a television station last week that the clinic convinced him to borrow 30,000 yuan ($4,180) to pay for the surgery.
“For money, one can give up one’s humanity,” said one of more than 2,600 comments on Chinese social media site Weibo, where posts about the boy’s plight have attracted more than 27 million views.
“Worse than monsters!” said another.
The mother was able to cancel the loan with the help of the TV station and lawyers, but the breast surgery had already been performed.
Scams such as recruitment for non-existent jobs, false advertising and loan traps are on the rise in China as the economy stumbles, with the top legal prosecution agency saying last year that scammers are targeting more students and recent graduates.
A record 11.79 million students graduated this summer, as the world’s second-largest economy grapples with one crisis after another, from the trade war and the fallout from Covid-19 to a protracted housing crisis and cautious consumer spending.
The youth jobs crisis could test the economic leadership of the ruling Communist Party, which has repeatedly urged people to “listen to the party.”
President Xi Jinping said this year that creating jobs for young people is a top priority, expressing concern about their employment prospects.
false promises
Youth unemployment hit a record high of 21.3% in June last year, prompting China to stop publishing the closely watched index, saying students still enrolled should be excluded.
There is no way to track all job seekers among people aged 16 to 24, but a spokesman for the National Bureau of Statistics said last year that 33 million of them were looking for work.
“Employment pressures remain,” Liu Aihua, spokeswoman for the statistics bureau, said at a news conference on Thursday, after data showed China’s overall unemployment rate rose to a four-month high in July.
“Key groups are still under pressure (to find work).”
In another scam that made headlines last month, a college student looking for a part-time job in food delivery was persuaded to sign a year-long contract to rent an electric bike.
A bike rental shop employee, who pretended to be a recruiter for popular food delivery service Meituan, told the student that he had to rent a bike before starting work.
After a few weeks, the student realized that his income was much less than the “tens of thousands” promised by the “recruiter,” and he was barely able to afford the monthly rent.
“Finding a job is so difficult, now we have to be careful about scams too,” said one commenter on Weibo.
Authorities say the bleak outlook for job prospects has led some students to become scammers themselves.
The first 10 months of 2023 saw a 68% year-on-year increase in the number of people under 18 prosecuted for phone and internet fraud, the Crown Prosecution Service reported last November.
She added in her report that incidents of young graduates with advanced university degrees joining fraud networks have also increased.
The Wuhan teenager’s mother said on television that her son’s trauma was compounded after he had to undergo a second surgery to remove breast implants.
“It hurts me to see the two scars under my son’s chest,” she added.
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