Behind it is a complex and practical China.
Original
The famous dancer and actor Venus once complained on the show that the scammers of telecommunications fraud were too unprofessional: they couldn't even speak Mandarin well.
A plastic Mandarin sentence makes Venus recognize that the other party is a liar.
In real life, I believe that many people have also received calls from people who call themselves "so-and-so banks" or "public prosecutors" and so on.
Although the other party has tried very hard to speak Mandarin, the thick southern accent still betrays his identity, which is a liar!
It's a very funny experience, you know they are liars, but he is working very hard to "work", but because Mandarin is not passed, an inexplicable sense of joy makes you very dramatic.
But have you ever wondered why scammers can't speak Mandarin well?
A few years ago, an analysis reported that the annual "output value" of telecommunications fraud exceeded 100 billion yuan.
In May, police in Chenzhou, Hunan Province, smashed a telecommunications fraud gang involving up to 1 billion yuan.
Supposedly, the telecommunications fraud industry is very "golden", but why don't they hire someone who speaks Mandarin well?
Phone scams have escalated from the landline era to the smartphone era, the tools have improved, why don't the crooks improve their accents? Is it really hard to find an "accomplice" with better Mandarin?
Or, after so many years, such a bad "user experience" in communication, the crooks themselves have no number in mind?
But if you know it and are not willing to change the status quo, then there must be some reason for this.
After so many years of anti-fraud propaganda, most people receive calls with unfamiliar accents, and they will be vigilant, especially this kind of Mandarin speaking unfavorable, and hang up the phone without listening to two sentences.
However, there will always be people who can't help but enter the "bureau" of the scammer and unconsciously become the target of the scammer.
In fact, the scammers actually screened out most of the invalid "customers" in a very simple and rude way through a very simple and rude accent.
Think about it, assuming that the scammers change to the same standard Mandarin as regular customer service to contact you, a question and an answer, is bound to increase the "workload", especially around half a day, if you are not deceived, it is really a blind delay.
Scammers are actually mostly young and middle-aged
To put it simply, it's like the very simple "handkerchief throwing" game we had as a child, in which scammers used not very good Mandarin as "handkerchiefs" and threw them at everyone who answered their phone.
The person who hangs up the phone directly is equivalent to the person who did not answer the "handkerchief", and everyone saves time and effort; but if you are unaware of their rotten Mandarin, you can continue to talk, Bingo! This "handkerchief" is caught by you, and anyone who can pick up the stubble is a "very stupid and naïve" potential customer.
For the scammers, it is not difficult to ask a good Mandarin "customer service", the problem is that it directly increases the difficulty of the game, the cost increases, and you have to accompany the whole process of "fighting wits and courage", which is really not cost-effective.
Therefore, it is not that the scammers are unprofessional, but precisely that they intend to do it.
It is this seemingly feeble "accent" that efficiently allows the crooks to screen for their targets, and even extends to other tricks.
For example, tricks such as "the reincarnation of Qin Shi Huang" and "the legacy of the last imperial family" through group text messages are just the text version of this screening mechanism.
If this shows how clever the crooks are, it seems that some of them have lifted them up.
In fact, the scammers' Poor Mandarin is not really how good they are, but more of the result of "inadvertent willow insertion".
The reason is unexpected by many people: Chinese Mandarin has been fully popularized for many years, but there are still about 300 million Chinese people who cannot use Mandarin normally.
China began to formally promote Putonghua in 1956, and it took decades to basically promote and popularize Putonghua education in most cities and regions.
Unfortunately, even though Mandarin has been promoted for decades, there are still many people who don't speak Mandarin well.
At the beginning of this month, the Ministry of Education held a press conference, and the survey data showed that the nationwide Penetration Rate of Putonghua reached 80.72%, an increase of 27.66 percentage points over 53.06% in 2000, and successfully completed the goals set in the "Thirteenth Five-Year Plan" development plan for the language and writing industry.
However, this also means that nearly 20% of the remaining people, that is, nearly 300 million people still cannot communicate fluently in Mandarin.
One reason is that the language systems of various parts of the country are not only very old, but also extremely complex.
Take the Chinese language system we are familiar with, divided into northern dialects, Wu dialects, Gan dialects, Xiang dialects, Min dialects, Cantonese dialects, Hakka dialects and other dialects, of which the southern dialects are more complex and difficult to understand.
Like Anhui, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Fujian and other places, although they belong to the same province, the dialects of each region are very different, and some are separated by a mountain, and the words spoken are completely different.
Even if you can't understand the dialect, sometimes, people who can't speak Mandarin try to communicate with you in Mandarin, and the feeling is too "sour".
For example, there is a jianghu joke that "the sky is not afraid, but it is afraid that Hu (Fu) Jianren speaks Mandarin."
Heaven is not afraid, I am afraid that Hu (Fu) Jianren speaks Mandarin
Fujian people belong to the Min dialect, Mandarin is not good, summed up is 5 points:
There is no tongue warping, such as: eating (chi) said to be ci; is (shi) said to be si
There is no nasal sound, i.e. "n" is said to be "l". For example, cow (niu) is said to be liu; slave (nu) is said to be lu
There is no post-nasal sound, such as chenggong, pronounced chen'gon
"r" is said to be "l", e.g. into (ru) is said to be lu
"f" pronounced as "h": fat (fa) pronounced as hua
Not only "Hu Jianren", southerners and northerners often make a lot of jokes because of language differences.
Someone asked a Shanghai girl who came to beijing to study,
"What do crabs say in Shanghainese?"
The girl said, "Ha. ”
The man then asked, "What did the fish say?" ”
The girl said, "Hmm. ”
The man was a little strange and asked, "What do you say about the shrimp?" ”
The girl said, "Oh. ”
The man was helpless and asked, "What about the duck?" ”
The girl said, "Ah! ”
As a result, the person who asked looked at her sympathetically: "What a good child, but it is a pity that she is a mute." ”
Interestingly, dialects have brought trouble in communication, but they also have a special role in specific historical circumstances.
The famous patriotic general General Wei Lihuang was from Hefei, Anhui Province, and his guard battalion was all Hefei people, and they were usually vigilant, and there was no need to formulate passwords at all, so they relied on "Hefei dialect" as the language of identification between the enemy and us.
Even in the border self-defense counterattack war of the last century, because the Vietnamese side was very familiar with many of our codes, it often listened to the military intelligence intercepted by our radio, creating many troubles.
Later, some people suggested that a group of communication soldiers from Wenzhou be transferred to the front line to use the difficult Wenzhou dialect to transmit intelligence and issue orders, and the results were miraculous.
Even if the Vietnamese side intercepted the signal, it could not figure out what the content was.
It is precisely because the dialects in many places are obscure that the state has made great efforts to promote Mandarin, and has also achieved results, and at present, almost all primary and secondary schools in the country have popularized Putonghua education.
It's just one thing to popularize, it's another to be proficient.
In many places with strong dialects, children only speak Mandarin in school, and their daily communication is still based on dialects, and over time, dialects are still the most important way of communication.
If you want to speak Mandarin well, you either have a certain level of education or live in a Mandarin standard environment.
Fraud is usually a group crime, which means that there must be sufficient trust between the gang members, otherwise something goes wrong and everything is lost.
Therefore, most of the people who are sucked into this group are fellow villagers who are geographically close, have a low level of education, and are eager to "get rich overnight".
Since they are fellow villagers, there is no need to use Mandarin between each other, and if a person who speaks Mandarin suddenly appears, he will be suspected of being an "undercover" of the police.
It doesn't matter if you don't speak Mandarin, there is special training and scripts anyway.
Because of this, scammers simply "make mistakes and make mistakes" and always "work" in non-standard Mandarin.
Some people may wonder why this kind of loophole telephone fraud can deceive so many people every year, and it is not happy?
There is also a reality here, although China's economic volume ranks second in the world, but the overall cultural level of the people is not as high as we think.
From the early days of the founding of New China, when 80% of the population was illiterate, Today, China has built the world's largest education system.
In recent years, a lot of news about the difficulty of finding jobs in universities has been instilled in people in various forms every year, and it seems that there are already many college graduates in China to the point of flooding.
Statistics show that from the resumption of the college entrance examination in 1978 to 2020, there are only 120 million college students (including college students) graduated nationwide, and about 8 million people with master's degrees or above.
To put it simply, college students make up less than 10 percent of the population, and graduate students make up less than 1 percent.
Even with the expansion of enrollment in recent years, the number of undergraduate and master's students has not yet reached the point of rotten streets.
From the resumption of the college entrance examination to 2020, a total of more than 80 million undergraduate students have been born
This means that more than 90 percent of people in China still have no higher education, and some even have no basic education.
According to the data of the seventh census in 2021, there are still 37.75 million illiterate people in China, and the illiteracy rate is 2.67%.
Although it has been much lower than before, the total illiterate population is still large because of the large population base.
The United Nations definition of illiteracy is divided into three main categories:
1. People who can't read, read, or write;
2. People who cannot identify modern social symbols, including maps, curves, tables, etc.;
3. People who can't use computers to learn, communicate and manage.
In other words, according to the standards of the United Nations, the number of illiterate people in our country may be more than 30 million.
This is not to say that the deceived are illiterate, but only that with the advent of the Internet era, all kinds of information are overwhelming, creating a certain degree of "information gap".
Many people who are deceived, because they lack sufficient recognition of various social information, unconsciously fall into the "poor information" scam carefully woven by the scammers.
In the face of a gang of scammers with a strict division of labor and complete speech, even the deception of highly educated college students and even professors is not new.
Even people who specialize in anti-fraud work will be unfortunate to be "recruited" if they do not pay attention.
In May this year, a woman in Changzhou was an anti-fraud publicity officer of a certain enterprise and participated in many corporate anti-fraud publicity activities.
However, she also panicked after receiving a phone call claiming that she had taken a campus loan at university and that if it was not dealt with in time, it would affect the credit report.
She remembered that when she was in college, she did lend her ID card to her classmates to brush the bill, so she believed the words of the scammers.
As a result, under a series of tricks from the scammers, the other party cheated away 180,000.
The Internet is actually a projection of the real society
All kinds of telephone deception, although it is difficult to defend, but they are also very "fair": they do not distinguish between men and women, let alone pick academic qualifications.
Therefore, the scammers are not really bad at speaking Mandarin, but they are purely "business needs".
From the moment you pick up the phone and hear a crying and laughing plastic Mandarin, people have actually "reported themselves" and waited for the next "silly and naïve" target to enter the game.
What do you think about phone scammers who don't speak Mandarin well? Feel free to chat in the message area.