And neither they nor the police are laughing. The bogus stock markets appeared in Taiyuan, Linfen and in other cities of Shanxi, reported the Oct. 10 Hong Kong Ming Pao. The accused allegedly took money from would-be investors and sold fake shares to them, even charging commissions on the sales. To lure investors, some of these stock exchanges had computers displaying what appeared to be financial data.
Authorities claim, however, that the data was counterfeit-created and manipulated by the accused.
In fact, orders could neither be passed to legitimate stock exchanges nor be legally registered for transfer. All funds invested by the victims were deposited into the personal bank accounts of the alleged perpetrators, according to the article. The Shanxi public security department and the securities supervisory department investigated a total of six illegal securities operations. To date, the police have recovered only a fraction of this figure, the story said.