Chinese court pulls plug on SMS lottery scammers
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-05-11 14:30

Two Chinese men have been jailed for using cell phone text messages to swindle money from subscribers by telling them they had won lottery prizes, Xinhua news agency said in a report available on Tuesday.

The two were jailed last week for the scams in which they sent spam text messages telling recipients across China that they simply needed to send postage or lottery tax payments to designated bank accounts to claim their prizes, Xinhua said.

Similar illegal messages commonly clog mobile telephones in China, where short messaging services are widely popular among the country's approximately 260 million mobile phone users.

A county court in the southeastern province of Fujian jailed Gong Jianquan for eight years for illegally obtaining 133,067 yuan (US$16,000) in late 2003.

Li Wenqi was jailed for four years for illegal earnings of nearly 50,000 yuan (over US$6,000) since June 2002, Xinhua said.

It was not clear if the two were working alone or together.

More than 50 similar cases were cracked and 66 people convicted in the same county last year.

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