ON the surface, Binyang County in south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region appears to be an ordinary farming community. But look closer and the glittering homes with high-performance luxury cars in their driveways suggest something different.

Indeed, the quiet and peaceful county is renowned for its wealth; or rather notorious. Binyang, 70 kilometers northeast of the regional capital Nanning City with a population of 1.03 million, is known as “the village of fraud.”

Between 2009 and 2014, more than 1,000 villagers were caught swindling through QQ — China’s biggest instant message tool — involving over 2,200 cases, according to the local newspaper Nanning Evening Post. About 10 million yuan (US$1.6 million) has been clawed back.

No one knows exactly how many Binyang residents are involved in this “e-commerce business” — as locals describe it — but whenever an online fraud case is uncovered in China, the finger of suspicion points to Binyang.

“If you hear an out-of-town accent in a hotel, it’s probably undercover police,” police officer Xiao Shan, who came to the village to investigate cases, told the Nanfang Weekly.

Since 2008, police throughout China have found that many IP addresses used in online frauds point to one place — Binyang County.

Traditionally, it was a center for small family businesses engaged in traditional handicrafts such as the leather trade, paper making and hardware manufacturing.

But in the late 1980s, Binyang started to become infamous for fake goods and in 2002 hit the headlines for its “dollars fraud.”

Villagers claimed to have discovered large quantities of American dollars left in the 1930s by the Kuomintang government and sold these “vintage” bills.

And since 2008, local villagers have found a way to make big money through online fraud, say police. From village to village, villager to villager, fraud skills spread like virus in the county, according to officers.

No one is quite sure how these “dark arts” were brought into Binyang. According to some accounts these were introduced from east China’s Fujian Province; other sources say Guangxi residents who went to neighboring Guangdong Province learned them there.

The scam is based on stealing QQ account passwords using trojan malware. The con artist then impersonates the person whose QQ account they’ve hijacked and asks their family members and friends if they can borrow money.

This is paid in to a bank account set up by the scammer.

A variation on this is to swindle parents whose children are studying abroad. They pretend to be the student and tell the parents that they are ill or have had an accident and require money urgently. Anxious parents unwittingly pay cash into the fraudster’s account.

Last year, a more complicated fraud tailor-made for the corporate world was devised. Villagers would join accountants’ group chats, steal their QQ identities and dupe companies into paying cash into their accounts.

Last August, a group of villagers defrauded 12 million yuan from a company in northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province.

As their notoriety grew, Binyang residents were nicknamed “QQ boys.” Living up to the reputation, suspected QQ boys hit the headlines last year by group buying 20 Audi A6s in Nanning.

The once-poor county has grown into a rich place with glitzy buildings, fine restaurants and fancy night clubs where young people gather.

In Shicun Village, farmers’ houses are at least three stories high, often decorated with gold-colored brickwork. In the courtyards, luxury cars such as Jaguars are a common sight.

Villagers are suspicious of outsiders, with strangers and strange cars attracting attention, reported the Nanfang Weekly.

“Never take photographs in the village,” a taxi driver surnamed Liao says. “Otherwise, you’ll be stuck here as villagers won’t let you leave.”

Certainly, Binyang has seen more money circulating in recent years.

The 2013 Binyang Government Report showed that earnings in the county’s catering sector had increased by almost 21 percent that year — hitting sales of 1.12 billion yuan. Meanwhile, Binyang house prices are the highest in the area.

In response to widespread online fraud linked to Binyang, in 2013 the Ministry of Public Security established an Internet security police station in Nanning and assigned special agents to work in Binyang’s more than 50 villages.

According to the Nanning Evening Post, the police confiscated 137 computers and drawers filled with bank cards in one raid alone last September.

“QQ fraud does not need too much high-tech equipment,” special agent Xiao says. “A computer, a bank account and access to the Internet are all that’s required.”

The trade has also spawned support industries including malware coders and developers who create private QQ trading platforms where criminal transactions can be conducted.

The apparent riches on offer make it difficult to keep young people on the straight and narrow, say local teachers.

“You can sit at home playing with your computer and make money,” says a teacher surnamed Lu from the local Wulingxiang Middle School. “So young people think, ‘Why not do it?’

“It’s like an infectious disease spreading all over the county. Parents said those QQ fraudsters can make much more money than university graduates,” she adds.

The youngest fraud suspect is only 13 years old, according to police. Working with family members, he used a ready-made script that includes who to chat with and what to say, according to officers.

In 2012, the local government put cracking down on QQ frauds at the top of its agenda, but police say swindlers have upped their game to meet the challenge.

Officers have found evidence of them using an IP address in the Philippines, which meant money-laundering and transferring was done overseas.

Statistics reveals that there are about 80,000 to 100,000 QQ frauds each year, and only 1 percent have been solved.

The cost of cracking cases and threats of violence have hit the clear-up rate.

“Sometimes the cost to solve a case is higher than the case itself,” special agent Zhao Luo says.

And during three raids last year, police was ambushed twice by the villagers. Even they caught the suspects, villagers grabbed them back.

“We’re sparing no efforts to catch them, but what really frustrates us is that we get suspects and their lawyers call immediately, claiming that we lack solid evidence,” Zhao says. “So we have to release them and next time their fraud skills have improved again.”