UBC café shut down by scandal

By Li Mao Source:Global Times Published: 2011-8-22 6:20:00

A UBC Coffee in Shanghai's Zhabei district was shut down earlier this summer, after the owner was caught employing young women to trick male customers into spending thousands of yuan on overpriced and watered-down drinks, local police said over the weekend.

The owner of the chain shop on Gonghexin Road and seven women involved in the scam were detained by police in June and are still awaiting charges, police said, adding that at least 30 men were victims of the scandal involving some 800,000 yuan ($125,200).

Police began investigating the case in May, after receiving reports from victims, who said that they were taken to the coffee shop by women they met online – and forced to spend up to 30,000 yuan on wines a night.

Several women were hired to chat up men on local dating websites since last October, when the franchise shop opened. The investigation confirmed the expensive drinks – priced from hundreds of yuan to thousands of yuan – ordered by the women were in reality low-quality drinks purchased from wholesalers or supermarkets with a retail price of less than 30 yuan per bottle.

Local police said that while the men realized that they had been duped when the bill arrived – none of them refused to pay up.

"Most victims were aged 30 to 50," a police officer, surnamed Lu, who investigated the case, told local media over the weekend. "Many of them have decent jobs with high salaries so they could afford the bill; their purpose of meeting the girls was for dating."

Lu said that none of the girls provided paid sex services to the victims.

A staff from the UBC Coffee headquarters, who asked not to be named, said that the office was aware of the scam for some time before police began their investigation.

"But, we didn’t have the authority to intervene," she told the Global Times on Sunday.

She said that the owner had cleverly charged the overpriced drinks to a privately owned company he had created, and not to UBC Coffee.

"We hate to see this kind of thing happen at one of our franchises," she added. "It hurts our reputation, but since each shop is treated as an independent business, there is little that we can do in these kinds of situations."



Posted in: Society, Metro Shanghai

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