It's possible given the Chinese government's proficiency in abusing terms.
But it seems for now mostly it's still about real crimes. Guys pretending to be from FedEx, saying your delivery have heroin in it, is seized and you need to pay a fine to get out of trouble. This may sound stupid to you, but anecdotally, one smart friend of mine doing physics PhD at MIT recently got tricked to pay ~$2000. BTW: a significant amount of those calls originated from Taiwan, easy to tell from the accent.
Those scam calls are quite common in Taiwan unfortunately, and it's fairly well known here that it's a big mafia enterprise run by the bamboo union. The government recently repatriated a bunch of Taiwanese that had been trafficked to Cambodia and were being forced to work in scam call centers.
But it seems for now mostly it's still about real crimes. Guys pretending to be from FedEx, saying your delivery have heroin in it, is seized and you need to pay a fine to get out of trouble. This may sound stupid to you, but anecdotally, one smart friend of mine doing physics PhD at MIT recently got tricked to pay ~$2000. BTW: a significant amount of those calls originated from Taiwan, easy to tell from the accent.