In May 2011, a fraud case was heard in Shanghai. Standing in the dock was a middle-aged man who looked fair and elegant, and his crime was gold fraud.

People nowadays are used to buying things in shopping malls and think it is safer, but is this really the case? A scammer took advantage of the payment process and created a sensational fraud.

In May 2011, a fraud case was heard in court in Shanghai. Standing in the dock was a middle-aged man who looked fair and elegant, and his crime was gold fraud.

On the day of the trial, the court was packed with citizens and reporters who came to watch. The court also broadcast the trial process of this case live online.

Why are people so concerned about this person? It turns out that is Lu Hantao, the "best liar" who caused a sensation in Shanghai. In 2 hours, he stole 1,500 grams from the gold counters of four large shopping malls in downtown Shanghai without spending a penny. gold.

In the court, the judge stated Lu Hantao's crimes one by one and asked him whether he pleaded guilty. Lu Hantao admitted his actions. However, when interviewed by reporters after the trial, Lu Hantao's face looked a little disdainful: Me too. I didn't expect to succeed so easily. They were so stupid and easy to deceive.

What method did Lu Hantao use to steal so much gold in a short period of time?

01 The mysterious big boss

December 25, 2010, Christmas, which happened to be a Saturday, was crowded with people in the center of Shanghai. The business of several shopping malls was extremely good. Customers came and went, and scalpers also took the opportunity to look for "customers" outside the shopping malls. ".

At this time, a middle-aged man in a suit walked towards him. He looked polite and looked like a big boss.

The scalper rushed up to greet him and whispered, friend, do you want a coupon?

Unexpectedly, the man didn't even give him a look and left the mall. The scalper curled his lips, pretending to be something, maybe he was a pickpocket, dressed like a dog, maybe he fled the scene after he succeeded.

The scalper saw that his "business" was not good, so he went to the mall to chat with the gold teller he knew. He talked about the arrogant man just now and teased him as a "thief".

The teller gave him a blank look and told him not to talk nonsense. That person is our customer. He just bought a 500-gram gold bar. He is very generous. At first glance, he is a big boss.

The teller recalled that when the man bought gold just now, he seemed to be quite knowledgeable. After selecting the gold, he went directly to pay without much fuss.

html The teller was quite happy when he met such a customer at the end of the year. At least he didn't have to worry about his performance today.

Before the two of them could say a few words, the counter manager who was responsible for registering the sales business on the computer ran over, pulled the teller selling gold bars and asked, The person who bought gold bars from you just now, what is on the payment slip he brought over? How come the time record is earlier than the time you issued the invoice?

The teller was shocked. He quickly took the payment slip and observed it carefully. Sure enough, the payment time was earlier than the time he issued the invoice. How could this be possible?

The teller quickly took the payment slip to the cashier staff and asked, but the cashier said, We have never issued this payment slip at all.

At this time, the manager suddenly reacted: , is not good, call the police quickly, we have been cheated!

02 The civet cat exchanges for the prince

The mall leader quickly called the police, and investigators from the Criminal Investigation Detachment of the Huangpu Public Security Bureau quickly rushed to the mall where the crime occurred to understand the situation.

The teller who just sold gold carefully recalled the mysterious "big boss" under police questioning: He looked to be forty years old, not tall, of medium height, wearing a gray-green suit with a black briefcase and a pair of glasses. He is probably not a local, and he sounds like he has a northern accent.

The police then called the surveillance camera in the mall and based on the teller's description, they identified a man.

discovered from the surveillance that the man seemed to have a clear goal. As soon as he entered the mall, he went straight to the gold counter. After negotiating with the teller for a short time, he went to the cashier and then returned, putting the gold bars in his bag. He left directly without any lingering behavior.

After the incident, the teller recalled that the customer arrived at about 11:45. As soon as he came to the counter, he asked for a 300-gram pure gold bar with the word "tiger" printed on it and two gold bars with the word "rabbit" printed on it. 100g pure gold bar.

It is relatively rare to buy so much gold at once, but then the teller thought that this year was the World Expo , and the man seemed not short of money. He might have bought it as a souvenir, so he gave him a few gold bars. Men's Choice.

During the purchase process, the teller also found that the man seemed to be an expert and was familiar with the gold market.

Due to the scarcity of gold, the market price is different every day. According to the price of the day, the price of gold per gram is 308.4 yuan. The man selected a total of 500 grams of gold bars. After including the processing fee, the total is 155,742 yuan.

After the teller issued the payment slip and delivery slip to the man, he asked him to go to the cashier to pay. About seven or eight minutes later, the man returned with the payment slip. The teller took a brief look at it and gave the gold to the man if he found no problems.

thought it was a good deal with both money and money, but he didn't expect to encounter a scammer.

Then the police officer looked at the fake payment slip given by the man and found that at first glance, it was no different from an ordinary payment slip. It even had the official seal of the mall. But if you look closely, you will find the fake payment slip. In terms of fonts and colors, there are still some subtle differences from real bills.

Before the police officers could finish investigating the case, Huangpu Public Security Bureau Command Center came again with news that a fraud case also occurred at the gold counter of another famous department store on Nanjing Road . The police officers rushed to Nanjing. Road, Unexpectedly, just 15 minutes later, news came again from the command center that another large department store on Nanjing Road also reported the incident to the police.

In just half an hour, three shopping malls on the same road reported the crime one after another, and the pressure on the police suddenly increased.

But this was not over yet. Then news came from the Shanghai Public Security Bureau Command Center that two more gold fraud cases had occurred in the famous shopping malls of Shanghai Pudong and Yangpu.

Among them, in the Pudong case, the suspect did not succeed because the tellers were more careful. However, the gold in the Yangpu shopping mall was successfully defrauded. The method of committing the crime was exactly the same as the three cases on Nanjing Road.

According to police statistics, in just two hours, four shopping malls called the police, involving more than 10 stolen gold bars, with a total value of up to 610,000 yuan.

This case quickly attracted the attention of the whole society. Due to the large amount of money involved and the special means of committing the crime, the Shanghai police set up a task force to pursue the suspects.

03 Chasing the Thief

Since cases occur frequently in a short period of time, the police must first determine whether a gang committed the crime. After collecting surveillance videos from various shopping malls where the crime was reported, investigators found that there was only one man in who appeared in the shopping mall at the time of the crime, and his physical characteristics were relatively consistent with the teller's description.

The police then printed out the man's photo and called the tellers who had been deceived. They were unanimously identified.

At this point, the target of the crime is clear, and this middle-aged man is the culprit of these five fraud cases. After identifying the suspect, the police immediately began investigating the suspect's path of action.

In the Yangpu shopping mall, the police obtained surveillance and found that after leaving the mall, the suspect took Metro Line 2 to Pudong and then entered a shopping mall. He may have wanted to repeat the same trick, but due to the vigilance of the tellers in Pudong, the man failed. Soon after, the suspect disappeared from the surveillance screen.

In order to find the suspect, the police retrieved subway surveillance videos from several major shopping malls during the reporting period on the 25th. found that the suspect came out of the Shanghai Railway Station station on Metro Line 1 at 9:15 that day. This shows that the suspect is Came to Shanghai by train.

Based on the suspect’s northern accent and the train arriving in Shanghai around 9 o’clock, the police finally determined, with the cooperation of the Railway Bureau, that the suspect got on the high-speed train from Kunshan to Shanghai. Arriving in Shanghai at 9:11 am.

After grasping this clue, the police quickly rushed to Kunshan and launched an investigation into local hotels and bathhouses. Finally, they found traces of the suspect in a small hotel.

Unfortunately, when the police found the hotel owner, the owner said that the man had already checked out the day before.

Although a little disappointed, the police determined the suspect's true identity based on the information he left at the hotel.

It turns out that the man's real name is Lu Hantao, a native of Tengzhou, Shandong Province, born in 1977. In July 2004, Lu Hantao was sentenced to six years in prison for arson. Because he actively performed labor reform in prison and performed well, he was eventually released early in 2008.

The hotel owner said that Lu Hantao had been staying with him for more than two months. Apart from talking less, he didn't feel anything was wrong. He didn't look like someone with a criminal record at all.

People's hearts are separated from each other, who knows that an ordinary tourist is not only an arsonist, but also a gold thief. After

obtained the true information about Lu Hantao, the police quickly released nationwide wanted information. Within a week, Lu Hantao was arrested at a bank in Tianjin.

04 Modus operandi

After being arrested, Lu Hantao confessed to the crimes he committed, but when he mentioned how he defrauded so much gold, Lu Hantao's expression was a little strange:

I can't believe it myself, it seems like here People are so stupid and so deceptive.

It turns out that in October 2010, Lu Hantao came to Shanghai to buy gold. At that time, he discovered that the tellers in the shopping mall would not follow the customers to the cashier to pay after issuing the sales voucher. Shan won't take a closer look.

After Lu Hantao discovered this, he had a crooked idea in his mind. This payment slip didn't look difficult, and he could make it himself.

So he booked a room in a small hotel in Kunshan and bought crime tools such as seal engraving machine and laptop from the Internet to prepare forged receipts.

To this end, he also visited Shanghai many times to check out locations. identified Line 10, which passed through many shopping malls, as the crime route, and specifically selected shopping malls where the gold counters were far away from the cashiers to facilitate the crime.. He also made multiple purchases in several shopping malls he was interested in to obtain shopping vouchers and become familiar with the shopping process.

After that, he began to stay in a small hotel and concentrate on studying how to forge a more realistic cashier slip.

With his proficiency in computers and graphics technology, Lu Hantao "designed" and printed out documents that were sufficiently authentic, and he also carved the cash receipt stamps of the relevant shopping malls by himself.

But there is another important question at this time: the price of the gold market is not stable. How can he ensure that the invoice and cashier's receipt are the gold price of the day, and at the same time ensure that the purchase time is consistent.

In this regard, Lu Hantao said during the trial , in his many visits to the spot, he found that the price of gold on Saturday and Sunday was basically the same as the trading price on Friday night, and the chance of change was very small.

So Lu Hantao set the time of committing the crime on Saturday. He checked the gold price in advance on Friday night, and then based on the fluctuation range of the gold price, he produced more than 30 cashier slips with different prices to deal with different situations. .

At the same time, he also planned a strict time route for committing the crime, choosing to commit the crime near noon, so that the time on the forged cashier receipt would match the time of his actual purchase.

It’s just that this plan was too sophisticated, and he was eventually exposed because of the time issue on the cashier slip.

05 Ending

Originally, Lu Hantao planned to go to Yuyuan , where there are more gold and jewelry stores, to continue the fraud after committing the crime in Pudong Shopping Mall, and at the same time sell the gold bars he obtained.

However, because the teller saw through the ruse in the Pudong shopping mall, Lu Hantao was worried that he would be exposed, so he quickly fled Shanghai, returned to Kunshan to destroy the traces of the crime, and then rushed to Beijing to sell the stolen goods and deposit the cash in Tianjin Bank.

However, the Skynet network was in full swing and Lu Hantao was eventually captured by the Tianjin police who received the wanted information while going through the formalities. He was then handed over to the Shanghai police and sent to court to receive justice.

Lu Hantao was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 11 years in prison, deprived of political rights for one year and fined RMB 50,000.

Lu Hantao’s criminal methods are not particularly clever, but he is able to commit four crimes in a row. This makes people have to reflect on whether there are loopholes in the management process of large shopping malls. How can we avoid such problems in the future?

And Lu Hantao's fate also tells us that must not try to use his own intelligence to challenge the bottom line of the law, otherwise he will have to taste the consequences in the end.