https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/chinatowns-ghost-scam
Investigators determined that the suspects were middle-aged women, working in crews of three or four, and that almost all of them came from southern coastal provinces, whose proximity to the wealth of Hong Kong and Taiwan creates tempting opportunities for criminals. The scammers travelled first to Taiwan and other cities across Asia, and then to Chinese communities in the United States, Canada, and Australia. In the summer of 2012, in San Francisco, there were more than fifty incidents, which netted an estimated $1.5 million in cash and goods. Nine people have since stood trial, and received prison sentences of up to four years. The prosecution said that the defendants were professionals who had been conning elderly Chinese women around the globe.
. The initial conversation with the victim was a way of harvesting personal information. Using a cell phone, the first two scammers could have the third listen in, or they could send texts of the pertinent points. The third scammer would then seem to have supernatural insight into the victim’s life, making the warning about the family member in danger more credible. At every stage, the gang would hurry things along, to heighten panic. Interiano said, “By the time that the victim is given a way of solving all these problems, they just want to get out of it: ‘O.K., fine, I’ll do whatever it takes to save my family member.’ ”
The mother of the girl with menstrual problems was told that an offended spirit in the underworld was responsible. The news for Wang was even more dire: her son was in mortal danger. Because she had recently crossed a street in the exact spot where a pregnant woman had been killed two decades earlier, the spirit of the unborn child, a girl, had latched on to Wang, intent upon claiming her son for a husband. “My grandfather sees a great white tiger, a very ill omen,” the woman warned. Wang asked if she couldn’t just keep her son safe at home. The woman shook her head. “If the spirit wants him, she can make the most harmless actions fatal,” she said. “Your son might choke on his next sip of water.”
A little research revealed that they had been patched together from various strands of traditional Chinese belief. The white tiger has been a staple of Chinese astrology since antiquity; it represents a thirst for blood and is thought to bring mortal danger to infants and pregnant women. The forty-nine days that Wang was told to wait before opening the package echoed the forty-nine days that spirits of the recently dead must wait to be allocated their place in the afterlife—a belief that entered Chinese tradition, from India, in the fourth century B.C. The chant that she was told to recite was plausibly Buddhist, and the granddaughter’s gesture during the blessing, arms raised heavenward, evoked Daoist ritual.
Daoism, which originated in China around the fourth century B.C., introduced practices of occult medicine and exorcism. Buddhism, which was brought to China by Indian missionaries around the first century A.D., added the idea of continuous rebirth and the retributive effects of Karma. Meanwhile, Confucianism’s emphasis on filial piety formalized ancestor worship as part of everyday life: ancestors who did not receive offerings of food and incense would become hungry and irritated in the netherworld. “Gods, ghosts, and ancestors are all connected in this world view,” Lee told me. “Gods are exceptional historical human beings or ancestors who have become deified. Hungry ghosts are ancestors who have not been properly venerated.” (Many Chinese communities annually celebrate the Hungry Ghost Festival, in order to feed and placate these disruptive spirits.)
“The idea was that it was just for old people, and, with time, it would die out,” Ian Johnson, the author of “The Souls of China,” a recent book on the resurgence of religious belief in the country, told me. Religion didn’t die out, but, as Johnson explained, the decades of prohibition had eroded most people’s understanding of spiritual traditions. “If you are of a certain generation and grew up in the Communist state, you don’t really know what real religion is in China,” he said.
Published in the print edition of the October 30, 2017, issue, with the headline “The Ghost Scam.”
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