Con artists in Hyesan are promising to find defectors and secure prison camp releases, leaving families homeless after they sell houses to raise funds with no information to show for it.
“Multiple defector families have recently become the target of scams in the city of Hyesan. Fraudsters approach families who don’t know what happened to defectors in the family and rip them off on the pretense of finding their loved ones,” a source in Ryanggang province told Daily NK recently.
In these swindles, con artists charge between 50,000 and 100,000 Chinese yuan ($6,900 to $13,800) to learn whether the defectors are still alive and, if they turn out to be in a concentration camp, to pull strings to secure their release.
Since October alone, three families in Hyesan have sunk considerable sums of money into these fraudulent schemes.
One family was so convinced by scammers who pledged to bring news within a week that they sold their house to raise the necessary funds. This family ended up homeless without any news to show for it.
“A month went by without any word. But when the defector family pushed the broker for information, he lost his temper and insisted that the job couldn’t be rushed. Even now, the desperate family is paying daily visits on the broker and begging for help,” the source said.
Fear of political prison camps drives desperate families to bankruptcy
The people who fall for these scams have generally not heard from their family members for a long time. Some had eventually learned that their loved ones had been repatriated from China. But given the lack of news about their whereabouts or well-being, families spend their days in crippling fear that their loved ones may have died.
It’s estimated that hundreds of defectors in China have been arrested and repatriated to North Korea over the past few years. If the North Korean authorities find evidence of anti-state activities—such as church attendance or attempts to reach South Korea—the repatriated individuals are reportedly sent to a political prison camp.
North Koreans assume that nobody sent to a prison camp ever gets out alive. So North Koreans who learn that a defector in the family has been repatriated do everything in their power to learn what happened and to save their life.
But these families’ panic is precisely what scammers seek to exploit, the source said.
Defector families argue that if the government would only notify them of their loved ones’ health and location, the harm from these scams could be reduced.
“The government apparently refuses to share information about defectors’ fate to spread fear about how even their families suffer from their actions,” the source speculated.
“Defector families who are paralyzed with fear about what might have happened to their loved ones scrape together money and end up bankrupting themselves without getting any closer to the truth. Life here (in North Korea) is agonizing for the families of defectors.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: dailynk.com
