Chinese man jailed for more than six years over medical equipment scam at height of coronavirus pandemic
- The fraudster from Hubei province collected orders worth US$61,000 but spent most of the money on online gambling
- In another case in the same city, two men were jailed and fined for using fake documents to import medical supplies
A Chinese man has been jailed for more than six years over a medical equipment scam in the early days of the Covid-19 outbreak.
The man from Jingzhou in Hubei province – just 200km (124 miles) from Wuhan, the initial epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak – had taken orders for thousands of masks worth 400,000 yuan (US$61,000) in one week but only delivered a fraction of the total.
Chutian Metropolis Daily reported on Sunday that a county court found he had taken the orders from six people via social media in early February, a time when the disease had started to spread across the country, but had spent the money on online gambling.
The man, surnamed Yang, was sentenced to six and a half years in jail, fined 30,000 yuan (around US$4,600), and ordered to compensate the buyers for the full sum of their orders.
The newspaper also reported on another recent case in another court in the city, where two men were jailed and fined for faking documentation to import medical equipment.
One man, surnamed Liu, ran a coronavirus patient isolation centre in Jingzhou and colluded with another man, surnamed Hong, to fabricate documents allowing them to import equipment, including a pass for Hong to transport the equipment to the isolation centre.
