FairAndUnbiased
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I doubt that you ever been in Viet Nam.
One of the engineers I work with recently returned from a temporary duty (TDY) assignment from Shanghai. His assignment for the past few months was to familiarize our assembly clients with our new products. His experience with mainland China, past and present, is that there is ENDEMIC corruption and collusion between the Chinese organized crime families and the police, national and local. He was robbed. The police keep tabs on all foreigners, especially if a person is white and obviously American, which my friend is. On this assignment, he was alone. The local Chinese police monitored his movements, determined that he actually was alone, and tipped off one of the local gangs. The police would get a cut, of course.
My friend was leaving his hotel (after work) early evening for a meal and some shopping for his family when he was accosted and turned into an alley. The policemen were within sight and they turned away. The robbers had a portable credit card scanner and they proceeded to 'swipe' his Wells Fargo VISA. When they found out his card was 'locked', they forced him to call WF to 'unlock' his card. According to my friend, the WF agent asked pretty much a rhetorical question that he was being robbed. He confirmed that he was. The fact that WF locked his card so quickly is telling. It means that such robbery of foreigners is common enough that WF had a quick and readied procedure to deal with an unauthorized attempt to access a client's money. The portable credit card scanner must have been the giveaway.
Then they forced him to another street that have a local bank ATM. When they found out that this method still did not worked, they threatened to beat him up unless he can convince WF to 'unlock' his VISA. There was no way that WF was going to release his accounts. From the moment he was forced to call WF, the bank locked all of his accounts, from savings to checking to retirement investments. They secured everything. The only way they would release his access was if he was calling from an American consulate number. In the end, the robbers took about $300 in cash and let him go, ruffled but relatively unharmed.
The Chinese police, national and local, know that if any real physical harm come to any foreigners, especially the white gweilos, in sufficient numbers to generate worldwide attention, they would be forced to do real police work. So the best thing to do are simple intimidation, rough up the foreigner a bit, take whatever is available at the moment, then split the loot. The local police commander does not need to know and usually he does not want to know what/how his officers do to supplement their incomes. As long as his officers and the crooks target single foreigners and scare the person a bit, not much will happen in the media since the Chinese government controls the media anyway.
I'm calling BS on this.
