WHEN an entrepreneur surnamed You set out to build a sales team in Shanghai in December 2020, she thought she had hired a team full of potential to sell her firm’s fund products.

What she didn’t count on was for the 10 new hires to be regularly absent for work and fail to seal any deals. Worse still, they worked together to create a false sense of assurance of progress.

Eventually, she learned that these employees were con artists, whose ulterior motive was to milk the firm of base salaries.