Rural residents require swindle awareness of illegal fundraising

AS MORE URBAN RESIDENTS have become aware that illegal fundraising cheats them out of their hard-earned money, and the police have strengthened their enforcement to curb such fundraising, some of these confidence tricksters are reported to have expanded their "business" to certain rural areas. Legal Daily reports:

Those who illegally raise funds always invest the money in highly risky businesses or even spend the money on luxuries for themselves. In both cases, the money raised will be lost.

That loss is more painful for rural residents than for their urban counterparts. In some cases, rural residents handed over the money intended for buying next year's seed to those promising to invest it for them. When they lost their money they were helpless and hopeless.

Thus it is no exaggeration to say that illegal fundraising causes more harm in rural regions than in cities.

In order to fight the illegal fundraisers, it is necessary to know how they cheat. Some make use of family relation networks in rural regions and cheat rural residents by abusing their trust in relatives, which is harder to prevent.

Some illegal fundraisers make use of the lack of supervision over existing rural credit cooperatives to hold illegal fundraising activities. In April, Zhao Tieqiao, an official on agricultural economy at the Ministry of Agriculture, mentioned this, saying that there is no specific governmental department supervising rural credit cooperatives.

Thus, to sum up, the illegal fundraisers make use of either the lack of financial supervision in rural regions or rural residents' lack of caution against illegal fundraising. Therefore, the key to curbing such illegal activities lies in two aspects: First, strengthening supervision over rural credit cooperatives so that they won't be used for illegal activities; Second, increasing rural residents' awareness of illegal fundraising.

Besides, it is also advisable to combine the fight against illegal fundraising with the ongoing efforts to alleviate poverty in rural areas, so that the residents who have newly become better off won't be cheated into becoming poor again.