Death of graduate suspected of being duped by fake company poses questions about job site

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Li Wenxing was found dead in a puddle in the Jinghai district of the northern Chinese city Tianjin on July 14.

The young man is believed to have been lured into working for a pyramid scheme posing as an IT company on a recruitment platform.

But questions have since emerged whether Li was murdered or took his own life.

Mystery still surrounds the case as an investigation into his death seeks answers to a host of questions, including the reliability of online job markets, which are considered a crucial lifeline for talented but unemployed youngsters.

A glimpse of hope after successive failures

Li majored in Resource Exploration Engineering at the Northeastern University, but it emerged that he never much cared for this subject.

Screen shots of the conversation between Li and Xue. /Photo via Caijing.com

Hoping to find his career path in China's booming IT industry, he signed up for coding courses in Beijing last July, with tuition fees estimated at 16,000 yuan (2,380 US dollars), a major financial burden for his family in the rural outskirts of Dezhou in eastern Shandong Province.

“Since March, Li had been looking for a new job through a phone app called Boss Hiring (Zhipin.com),” Hu Ze, Li’s roommate told the Beijing News, “He managed to secure interviews on 10 different occasions, but was not hired by any of the companies," he said.

But this run of bad luck was about to come to an end, or so Li thought.

On May 15, a person identifying himself as Xue Tingting contacted Li through the jobs platform, asking if he would like to join a project in Tianjin run by a company called Kelan.

“The project will last for two months,” Xue told Li, “You will be sent back to our Beijing headquarters afterwards.”

A telephone interview took place on May 18 and the next day, Li received an offer of employment from Kelan via email.

Li's job offer from Kelan. /Photo via Caijing.com

Two days later, Li set off for Tianjin. On the afternoon of May 20, he sent a text to his roommate telling him he was fine and in Tianjin's Jinghai district.

However, Li’s sister received two messages from him on the same day, in which he said he was in Binhai district.

“He was then out of reach for five days. He asked me if I could lend him 500 yuan (74 US dollars),” Hu told the Beijing News.

“Without any friendly greetings, he asked for another 500 yuan on June 8.”

Li’s high school classmate Wang Sheng also told Tianjin police that Li borrowed money from him - again on June 8.

“He told me he had left Tianjin and he was now employed in Shijiazhuang (in northern Hebei Province) as he had relatives there,” Wang said.

Kelan's profile page on the Boss Hiring portal. /Photo via Caijing.com

Li’s family later denied having any relatives in the city.

“I wanted to visit him in Tianjin, but he told me he was traveling between Tianjin and Shijiazhuang, so that nixed the plan,” Li’s younger sister, Wenyue, told the Beijing News. “We did sense he was being weird.”

The last call took place on July 8, when Li phoned his family warning them not to trust anyone who contacts them for money.

"Do not believe anyone who calls you for money," Li's mother remembered her son as saying.

The body, the notes and the vague circumstances

On July 14, a body was pulled from a puddle in Jinghai District, with no signs of physical injuries. The ID card found on the body showed that it was Li Wenxing.

The puddle where Li Wenxing's body was found. / Photo via Caijing.com

Pages of notes were also retrieved, showing that Li might have been involved in a pyramid scheme, according to an investigation statement issued by local police on Wednesday.

A pyramid scheme works by asking members of an organization to sell goods or services through other participants rather than directly to clients. Previous victims recalled being brainwashed through classes about the product or the service, and at times detained.

Jinghai District, where Li was working, is reportedly the largest hub for such illegal practices, though they were outlawed in 2009.

Li Wenxing graduated in June 2016./ Photo via Caijing.com

Li suspected that the company in Tianjin was a front and was connected to illicit and fraudulent activities as he had told a friend of such concerns.

Even before his left for Tianjin to start his job, he found that the online account of the company that recruited him had been deleted.

However, that did not deter him from taking a leap of faith, little knowing that it would lead to his demise.

The blame game

If the suspected company was fictional and unregistered, then how could its representative, Xu Tingting, have got passed the qualification procedures on the online jobs portal?

According to the Beijing News, dozens of college graduates have received questionable job offers through the platform, with many encouraged to travel to Tianjin.

One unnamed student from eastern Jiangsu Province said he received an offer with an unexpectedly high pay, but his recruiter asked him to move to Xiqing district in Tianjin.

He conducted research online and found accounts of similar experiences that turned out to be cases of fraud, so turned down the offer.

Boss Hiring was launched in July 2014, offering a platform for direct communication between job seekers and senior executives of companies. By July 2016, a total of 9.16 million job seekers and 1.54 million company managers had registered on the platform.

Boss Hiring admitted negligence on Thursday in the vetting of potential employers, Global Times reported.

"It is our fault that we failed to update our rules. The incident taught us a painful lesson. We have been vetting all employers on our platform before posting job openings starting August 3."

A reporter from the Beijing News attempted to register as a company manager on Boss Hiring and succeeded, exposing the weakness of measures the company has in place to verify the identity of individuals or entities looking to register.

The reporter received over 150 job applications within three hours, without any inquiries being placed.

Many netizens expressed their anger on Weibo.

“One of my colleagues was trapped in a similar organization but he managed to seek help. Pyramid schemes can destroy families,” said user @Neal_Hickory_Li.

“I used the same application before. I got a slew of job offers right after registering. I deleted it straight away. I knew it was fake,” noted @MaosantangtangWWW.