How do traditional organized criminal groups run their offline businesses on the internet? Drawing on interview data, news reports and interactions with illegal moneylenders, the two presenters will share their findings regarding how loan sharks use the online peer-to-peer lending market to lend money to Chinese students at exorbitant interest rates. Illegal lenders employ techniques of deception, the sharing of compromising information (e.g. social contacts and nude photos) and professional legal services to develop internet-based loan scams to trap student borrowers. To enforce loan repayment, lenders have developed a new strategy: relational repression, which is the use of cyberviolence and the threat of revealing damaging information to clients’ social contacts. This puts enormous pressure on clients and their families to make payments. The use of relational repression reduces the need to resort to physical violence and bribe police officers. The presentation is based on the speakers’ recently published journal paper: “Organized crime in cyberspace: How traditional organized criminal groups exploit the online peer-to-peer lending market in China”, The British Journal of Criminology, 2021, Volume 61, Issue 2, pp. 303-324.

About the Speakers:

Prof. Peng Wang is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, the University of Hong Kong. He holds an MA in Criminology and Criminal Justice and a PhD in Law from King’s College London. He is the author of The Chinese Mafia: Organized Crime, Corruption and Extralegal Protection (Oxford University Press, 2017). Peng has published a number of articles in The British Journal of Criminology and The China Quarterly. Other works appeared in journals such as Journal of Contemporary China, Trends in Organized Crime, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, Urban History, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, The RUSI Journal, and Global Crime.

Prof. Jingyi Wang is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Jingyi’s research and teaching interests focus on comparative tax law and fiscal policy. Her recent work examines Chinese tax law reform, information exchange, tax administration and Hong Kong tax policies. Her publications appear in British Tax Review, Australian Tax Forum and Hong Kong Law Journal.

Professor Wang obtained her PhD and LLM from King’s College London and her LLB from the East China University of Political Science and Law. Before joining CUHK, she was an Assistant Professor at the School of Transnational Law, Peking University, and a post-doctoral fellow in the Faculty of Law, the University of Hong Kong.

Moderator: Prof. Kevin Cheng, Associate Professor, CUHK LAW

The Law Society of Hong Kong has awarded this seminar 1.5 Continuing Professional Development (CPD) points.