The hotel staff member unscrewed the iodine disinfectant. They offered to go with him to the hospital, but he waved them off, pocketed 2,000 yuan in compensation, and left.
The man, identified as Su, has a crescent-shaped scar on the left side of his head. He got it stitched up a few years ago after falling while drunk. At the end of last year, while showering at a hotel in another city, he accidentally knocked the old wound and it bled a little. The hotel proactively offered to waive the room fee and cover his medical expenses. That was when he realized the scar could make him money.
He turned the scar into a business. The method was ready-made. Before checking in, he would pick at the scab until it reopened, prick his finger with a needle, and smear a little blood on his forehead. He targeted highly rated chain hotels, went straight to the bathroom to look for problems with the facilities, and staged a scene in which the showerhead had come loose. Then he would negotiate compensation with the front desk, hinting that if he wasn’t satisfied with how they handled it, he would post about it online.
At this Nanjing branch, he went through the whole routine and got 2,000 yuan. More than two months later, the hotel group compiled reports of unusual incidents from its branches and discovered that the same guest had used the claim that he’d been hit on the head by a showerhead to collect over 7,000 yuan from four of its branches. Police tracked him down and arrested him in Xuzhou, Jiangsu. At the time, he was about to check into another hotel.
According to a later police report, over the course of more than two months, he carried out over a hundred scams in more than ten cities, including Changchun, Tianjin, Shenyang, Dalian, Nanjing, Suzhou, and Shanghai, involving more than 100,000 yuan. He has been placed in criminal detention by Nanjing police on suspicion of extortion. An old scar from a drunken fall years ago became his highest-margin asset over those two months. No inventory to buy, no maintenance required; pick at it, sleep on it, and it heals overnight.
My take is that what he was really cashing in on wasn’t the hotels, but their cost of making problems go away. For a chain hotel, paying 2,000 yuan to silence a bad review is so cheap they don’t even need a meeting to approve it. As long as “pay to make it go away” remains an option, there will always be a market for this kind of scam.
Put this on-chain, and the story goes another way. The hotel caught him by reconciling its records after the fact—it took headquarters two months to go through the reports. On-chain, there’s no need to wait for reconciliation: once an address receives money, it’s permanently visible to everyone. From the first transaction to the last, it’s all right there. It’s the same idea of exploiting a loophole to the fullest, but on-chain there’s no option to “settle it privately.”
I don’t know exactly which year he fell and got that scar; reports only say it happened a few years ago. I also don’t know how much money he still had left when he was arrested. Police advised hotels that when a guest claims to have been injured, they should first preserve the scene and review surveillance footage, rather than privately settling the matter just to make it go away.
#酒店碰瓷 #敲诈勒索 #社会新闻 $BTC $ETH $USDC
The man, identified as Su, has a crescent-shaped scar on the left side of his head. He got it stitched up a few years ago after falling while drunk. At the end of last year, while showering at a hotel in another city, he accidentally knocked the old wound and it bled a little. The hotel proactively offered to waive the room fee and cover his medical expenses. That was when he realized the scar could make him money.
He turned the scar into a business. The method was ready-made. Before checking in, he would pick at the scab until it reopened, prick his finger with a needle, and smear a little blood on his forehead. He targeted highly rated chain hotels, went straight to the bathroom to look for problems with the facilities, and staged a scene in which the showerhead had come loose. Then he would negotiate compensation with the front desk, hinting that if he wasn’t satisfied with how they handled it, he would post about it online.
At this Nanjing branch, he went through the whole routine and got 2,000 yuan. More than two months later, the hotel group compiled reports of unusual incidents from its branches and discovered that the same guest had used the claim that he’d been hit on the head by a showerhead to collect over 7,000 yuan from four of its branches. Police tracked him down and arrested him in Xuzhou, Jiangsu. At the time, he was about to check into another hotel.
According to a later police report, over the course of more than two months, he carried out over a hundred scams in more than ten cities, including Changchun, Tianjin, Shenyang, Dalian, Nanjing, Suzhou, and Shanghai, involving more than 100,000 yuan. He has been placed in criminal detention by Nanjing police on suspicion of extortion. An old scar from a drunken fall years ago became his highest-margin asset over those two months. No inventory to buy, no maintenance required; pick at it, sleep on it, and it heals overnight.
My take is that what he was really cashing in on wasn’t the hotels, but their cost of making problems go away. For a chain hotel, paying 2,000 yuan to silence a bad review is so cheap they don’t even need a meeting to approve it. As long as “pay to make it go away” remains an option, there will always be a market for this kind of scam.
Put this on-chain, and the story goes another way. The hotel caught him by reconciling its records after the fact—it took headquarters two months to go through the reports. On-chain, there’s no need to wait for reconciliation: once an address receives money, it’s permanently visible to everyone. From the first transaction to the last, it’s all right there. It’s the same idea of exploiting a loophole to the fullest, but on-chain there’s no option to “settle it privately.”
I don’t know exactly which year he fell and got that scar; reports only say it happened a few years ago. I also don’t know how much money he still had left when he was arrested. Police advised hotels that when a guest claims to have been injured, they should first preserve the scene and review surveillance footage, rather than privately settling the matter just to make it go away.
#酒店碰瓷 #敲诈勒索 #社会新闻 $BTC $ETH $USDC