Local police in Baoding City, Hebei Province, recently uncovered a group of robbers by tracking their nicknames online, according to official reports.
In February this year a local police station reported a series of robberies of pedestrians in one area of town. All the bandits exposed their names when assaulting the victims, Xinhua news agency reported yesterday.
But the police soon found that all the names the robbers gave sounded very strange, such as “Lengyuweizanting” (None-Stop Cold Rain), “Zhongshigudan”(Faithful Loneliness), “Zhongjishijie” (Final World), and “Ziyouzizai” (Light-heartedness).
The police surmised that the names must be nicknames used by Internet surfers.
From then on they began lurking online, waiting for the appearance of these names in chat rooms. A few days later, the nicknamed bandits turned up in the chat rooms. The police began to talk with the robbers and arrested them, when they came to meet the police-surfers.
The arrested suspects’ real names are Wang Wei, Wang Hongbo and Wang Bo.
(www.eastday.com 05/11/2001)
