Chinese police have busted a major group making and selling counterfeit railway tickets and detained five suspects on criminal charges, according to a Sunday statement from the Ministry of Public Security.
The case dates back to December last year when police in east China’s Jiangxi Province found a man who purchased two fake train tickets from an online store ran by a person surnamed Cui. Police authentication showed that the two tickets were very elaborately made and non-professionals would have difficulties discerning them.
Follow-up investigations found that Cui’s store clocked some 1,750 deals and made a profit of 300,000 yuan (48,100 U.S. dollars) between last September and December.
Tracing the source of ticket deliveries to a county in central China’s Hubei Province, police nabbed four suspects who ran the business under the identity of Cui, confiscating paper, ink, computers, printers and scanners there on Dec. 26.
Their underground workshop was busted the following day.
The suspects began making and selling fake tickets in October 2013, and pocketed more than 980,000 yuan from the sales of over 25,000 tickets, said the statement, citing their testimonies to the police.
The fifth suspect, surnamed Wang, was seized in the city of Cangzhou in north China’s Hebei Province for providing the group blank ticket papers as well as manufacturing devices.
The Chinese Lunar New Year, or Spring Festival, which falls on Feb. 19 for the year 2015, is a key Chinese holiday as hundreds of millions of people travel across the country for family reunions, putting a huge stress on transportation.
