A Nine-Kilometre Move Cost 13,900 Yuan. Police Say a Family Gang Was Behind Hundreds Like It
A Nanjing man who agreed a fixed price for a local move was quoted 13,900 yuan after his belongings were loaded onto the truck — and the police who dug through nearly 3,000 complaint records found two family-run gangs working the same scheme, earning about 8 million yuan in three years.
The Nanjing man had agreed a fixed price for a local move in advance with the moving company's customer service. But once the workers loaded his belongings onto the truck, they began to find reasons to add charges — and the threats became sharper: "你家就在这跑不掉，除非你把房子卖了" ("your home is right here, you can't run away — unless you sell your house"). The nine-kilometre move ended up quoted at 13,900 yuan.
The Nanjing complaint was not an isolated one. Police reviewed nearly 3,000 complaint records and found that many victims had reported the same pattern, then dug into the leads and dismantled two family-related "套路搬" (moving-scheme) criminal gangs #黑搬家公司靠敲诈3年赚800万. The gangs posted low-price moving advertisements online to take orders, then held goods on the truck and used verbal threats and coercion to force the price up — some fees rose tenfold. The group had nearly 8 million yuan in revenue over three years, nearly 100 people were arrested, and the core members have been transferred for prosecution.
One Weibo user put the wider mood in the thread plainly: after you have been told to be an atomized individual with no friends and relatives, one commenter wrote, "资本鼓吹当原子人，不要有亲朋关系，过着'自顾自'的生活。然后，来一群稍有组织性的婴儿版恶势力就把孤立无援的你拿捏住了" ("capital tells you to be an atomized individual with no friends and relatives, living a 'just me' life. Then a group of slightly organized baby-gangsters comes along and takes you, who has no one to rely on, in hand").
The story broke across the same day as an official People's Daily commentary on the new patterns of gang-style crime in China, which listed the same pattern: low-price advertising to lure, then soft-violence coercion to force transactions. As one commentary put it, "公平有序的营商环境，是服务业健康发展的重要保障" — a fair and orderly business environment is the foundation of a healthy service industry, and the value of the crackdown is not only in arrests but in repairing the industry's ecology.
The Nanjing case is a reminder that the moving industry is a sector where a household's most valuable possessions are loaded onto someone else's truck, and the price is renegotiated after that. Until enforcement is routine, the moving-house scam is a consumer protection problem that has no obvious consumer protection answer.