Chinatown restaurants in Las Vegas are on high alert after they reportedly received scam messages threatening lawsuits and demanding payments through WeChat.
How it works: The scammer orders food from the restaurant pretending to have found a piece of metal washer in his meal after his child was injured while eating KTNV.
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Photos are sent through the WeChat messaging app, along with a request for the restaurant to pay its medical bills.
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“We’re afraid business will be hard to come by right now,” Jun Ren, who owns a restaurant in Chinatown and was asked to pay over $ 1,000, told the broadcaster. “We’re afraid they’ll spread it and say my restaurant did this and that.”
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Other local Chinese restaurant owners in a WeChat group also said they received the same photos and one of them paid money directly.
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Ren believes she and the restaurant owners have been targeted because they speak little to no English.
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At least six Chinese restaurants in the valley have been targeted in the past few months, according to Shannon Yang, who manages the Chinatown Vegas website and is also a member of the WeChat group.
Involve the FBI: Yang believes the scammers are Chinese and they use different phone numbers as exchanges are all made in Mandarin.
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She reached out to the FBI and wants other restaurant owners to stay vigilant.
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Ren believes non-Chinese will also be targeted.
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“I’m sending this warning to others so they don’t fall for it. I hope no one else does it the way I almost did, ”she told KTNV.
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The bureau told the broadcaster it could neither confirm nor deny that an investigation into the fraud had begun.
Selected image above KTNV
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