A woman in Yubei, in southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality, had the fright of her life on Tuesday when she received a call from what appeared to be a funeral parlour, offering promotions. The police later found out it was another phone scam.

The woman, named as Ms Li, told the Chongqing Economic Times she had a scare when she picked up her phone and saw the words “funeral parlour” pop up on her cellphone screen.

"Hi, you are an old customer. We’re calling to tell you that we’re having a promotion," a woman on the other end of the line said.

Tempted to hang up, Ms Li then worried something had happened to her family. With shaking hands, she says she dialed the police.

After investigating, it turned out the caller was actually the owner of a clothing store, informing regular customers of a big sale, and she had fallen foul of tormentors using third-party software to register phone numbers under unrelated people’s names.

Police said such scams were common but difficult to tackle as the software can be easily downloaded on the internet.

This was probably of little comfort to the clothing store owner, Ms. Wang, who said several customers did not answer her calls or quickly hung up. “Someone even called to scold me," she said.

Ms. Wang said a man had called her recently, telling her to pay his phone bill or she would face harassment, but she had ignored the call. It was unclear if that man was behind the funeral parlour call prank. 

Ms. Wang was not the only victim of such pranks. Local news website iqilu cited another man who reported in March receiving a text message or call every two seconds. He suspected it was revenge from a seller on Chinese online retailer Taobao from whom he had bought a pair of shoes and whom he had then given a bad review.