Everyone knows “Mr. Yi,” but no one knows who he is.
He is the most mysterious mastermind behind a scam empire: the writer of its scripts, the architect of its assembly lines, the man behind every strategy for fleecing victims. From street games of guessing which hand holds the seeds to online romance scams, from fake investment platforms to international cryptocurrency traps, he turned fraud into a standardized industrial process. Victims were sorted into three categories by age and weakness, each assigned a different cycle for milking them. He posted rules on the wall and wrote “Stop when you've made enough” in his memo, telling himself that he was different from the rest.
But he never stopped.
His name is Chen Mo. Just six months ago, he was a college student sitting in the corridor of a county hospital with only two thousand yuan to his name. His mother's leukemia couldn't wait for a donor match. After he was scammed while trying to sell his account, a crime boss took notice of him. “He got scammed, but didn't cry or make a scene. He sat in the corridor and analyzed the scam. That's what you call a nose for it.” From the moment he took his first envelope, he knew there was no turning back. When anti-fraud policewoman Lin Yu wrote the three characters “Mr. Yi” on her whiteboard, she had no idea that the person behind the alias had once stood on the same side as her.
Every scam exploits nothing more than human greed and fear. Between the people who get scammed and you or me, there is only an invisible line. Open this book, and you'll see the person standing on the other side of that line
