Fraud Victims Take to the Streets—and Skies

Seven Chinese investors who say they are among the victims of an investment scam flew to Singapore in mid-June to chase down leads. After filing complaints with the police, they conducted a six-day, round-the-clock stakeout of a home where they believed someone involved in the scheme was hiding. “We kept knocking on his door for hours,” says Zhao Guangcai, a Beijing businessman who organized the trip. In March, he’d led a similar expedition to Geneva, Bern, and Zurich in a failed attempt to track down the missing cash and the people who took it. “What we want is simple,” says Zhao. “Return the money to us.”

Zhao and his companions say they are among 29,000 people in China and Hong Kong who lost $1.2 billion investing with a company called API Premiere Swiss Trust that said it traded currencies. In Beijing, API investors have held four protests, including one outside the Embassy of Switzerland, urging the Swiss government to work with China on the investigation. In May, they demonstrated outside the government petition office in Dongcheng District, urging Chinese police to set up a unit to investigate the fraud. Investors in Hong Kong gathered outside a police station in Kowloon demanding stepped-up efforts.