Targeting the Chinese traders

Every time she parks at the door of her house she stays inside her car waiting. She doesn't dare get out alone. She calls her son to collect her and accompany her inside. They have attacked her in her Madrid home more than five times - once with a knife. Other times they've put her in a head-lock until she passed out. One day they took 5,000 euros- income from her business - but she is more afraid of them doing her harm than taking her money, so now she walks holding her bag with her arm outstretched to make it easier for possible thieves to take it and thus avoid any violence.

The multiple victim is a friend of Songlin Liu, president of the Association of Chinese Businesses in Spain, which represents more than 700 firms from the Asian country. And she is not the only one who is afraid. Liu says that gangs of thieves have identified a goldmine in attacking Chinese storekeepers and that he himself has been robbed several times - as has his daughter. The attackers are Colombians, Romanians and, also, according to police, other Chinese, who know the businesses, habits and customs of their compatriots well.

Robbers took 1 million euros at gunpoint from a van on a highway

The police calculate that only 10 percent of those attacked make a report

The hauls are usually substantial - as substantial as - 1 million, which robbers in October 2009 managed to take at gunpoint from a van on the Madrid-Barcelona highway. Or the 400,000 eurosthey took from the owner of a clothes store who was holding the money to pay his staff with.

The Chinese storekeepers usually carry their takings home in cash and do not report robberies very often because of a lack of trust in the law and, sometimes, because of a lack of knowledge of Spanish.

It is good business for the thieves, who rob them in their restaurants and shops, in their warehouses and in their homes. To avoid the cameras and the security guards that some of these storekeepers have, the robbers' latest trend is to wait for them to leave their shops, follow them home and, once there, take everything they are carrying and ransack their houses.

In the last few years the National Police's Central Brigade for Organized Crime has carried out 40 operations against Colombian gangs specializing in targeting Chinese victims, while UCRIF (the Unit Against Immigration and Counterfeiting Networks) in Madrid has identified various Chinese clans who have made robbing their fellow countrymen a way of life.

Cobo Calleja, in Fuenlabrada on the outskirts of Madrid, is the biggest wholesale point for Chinese products in Spain. Covering more than 1.5 million square meters, it is the biggest industrial zone in Europe. Traders from all over Spain and from other countries such as Portugal and Italy pass by to stock up on scarves, watches, decorative figurines and more.

The transactions done there are for big sums. Robbery victims deny that they do not want to make use of banks to look after their money, but say that because branches close in the afternoon, they have to take their cash home somehow. "And we can't avoid charging in cash because other payment methods are not secure," says Liu. They don't want to pay credit card commissions and they don't trust promissory notes. "Around here many people who are passing through make purchases and leave promissory notes that later cannot be cashed," he says.

"I have many promissory notes that I haven't cashed," adds his daughter. The solution is cash payment, though now they are starting to reconsider that.

There are no general figures for the number of reports filed by Chinese victims. "But anyway, the statistics would not reflect the magnitude of the problem," say police sources. They calculate that just 10 percent of those attacked file a report. And when they do, they often fail to tell the whole truth, nor reveal the amounts robbed from them. "The storekeepers do not think it will do any good, and what's more, quite often they come to Madrid for merchandise before heading to other cities or countries," explains Liu. "A police report isn't worth the trouble."

The Chinese who prey on their compatriots are mining a rich seam. "These individuals, better than anyone, know that these people usually keep their money in their houses or at their businesses. They only have to watch them to rob them and get a good haul," explains a police officer from the UCRIF in Madrid.

Wearing balaclavas, the attackers burst into the homes of their victims, bind everyone's hands with plastic ties (including those of children and old people) and spend several hours searching the house until they discover where its owner keeps the money - which on many occasions is in a safe. They are not happy simply to take the money and jewels; some of the attackers force the head of the family to go to their business and force them to hand over more money and valuable objects. On occasions, they intimidate them into taking out more money using credit cards.

Madrid police have identified at least half-a-dozen Chinese gangs, though not all of them operate in that region, rather extending their activities into other provinces and even Italy. "In the last operation we arrested a gang that we think was involved in 50 attacks, but we were only able to investigate 15 of them," explains the head of the Fifth Group of UCRIF in Madrid.

The attackers instill so much fear in their victims that they often cannot pick them out later. Consequently, the robbers remain unpunished - and free.