Why a Watch Clerk in Wenzhou Called the Police After Selling Two Rolexes
A couple in Wenzhou bought two Rolex watches for 673,000 yuan without trying them on or explaining why. The clerk who sold them called the police anyway, and officers intercepted the package before it reached the fraud network behind the purchase.
On the afternoon of September 7, a middle-aged couple walked into a watch shop on Danan Road in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, and went straight to the counter. The man held up his phone with a photograph of a Rolex and asked whether the store carried that exact model; the budget, they indicated, was around 700,000 yuan. They did not browse, compare dials or try anything on. The shop happened to have two of the watches in stock, priced together at 673,000 yuan — about 94,000 dollars.
The clerk, Deng Shiqi, found the scene odd enough to start asking questions. Had someone online quoted them this price? Was it a stranger who had sent them? Why did they want the watches at all? The answers kept shifting: first the purchase was a gift for family, then it was an investment. She sat the couple down in the shop's VIP room and warned them as plainly as she could — buy to keep or collect, by all means, but under no circumstances hand the watches over to anyone else: no couriers, no errand runners, no strangers coming to collect.
They bought the watches anyway. Deng spent two hours trying to talk them out of it, then watched them leave with the boxes — and went straight to the store's manager, Xin Jungao, who called the police. By the time officers reached the couple's home, the two were packing the watches for mailing, and still insisting that no one was cheating them. Only after sustained persuasion did the couple accept what had happened: this was what Chinese police shorthand calls an "investment scam" (投资诈骗). The store refunded the purchase in full.
The account, published this week by Red Star News and echoed across Chinese platforms, describes a scam format that has adapted to a decade of anti-fraud campaigning. The public has been drilled for years never to transfer money to a stranger — so, police and commentators note, the scripts now coach victims into buying physical assets instead: luxury watches, gold bars, anything valuable, liquid and shippable, presented as an "investment" or an "asset check." A summary that circulated on Weibo put the fraudsters' preferences bluntly: they "specialise in luxury watches and gold — they hold their value, they sell easily, they mail easily. Once the parcel goes out, the money is gone" (post).
What made the case travel, though, was the clerk. Deng had every reason to stay quiet: the sale was complete and the commission earned. Instead, Red Star News's post about her was liked more than 15,000 times within hours, with commenters singling out the sequence — warn, sell, report — as the anti-fraud textbook run by one person on a shop floor, and the judgment call that "firmly stopped 673,000 yuan of a family's hard-earned money."
The full refund closes the story for the couple. It does not close the other half of it: the account they were mailing the watches to — the people who spent weeks coaching them, and the address waiting for the parcel — appears nowhere in the police account at all.