Two Chinese women jailed for instigating children to steal
Women had ‘rented’ minors from their families
The duo, both from Yongzhou in central China’s Hunan province, were accused of organising minors to steal from cashier desks in shopping malls, optical stores, children’s clothing shops and mother and baby stores, that netted more than 19,900 yuan from March to May last year, the Shanghai People’s Procuratorate said, according to news portal Thepaper.cn.
Both women were sentenced to 42 months in jail and fined 10,000 yuan, the judge in the Qingpu district court said in ruling last week.
The judge said that the ruling was exemplary as similar cases of instigating minors to steal have become common on the mainland, the report said.
Police said that more than 150 female suspects, mostly from Yongzhou, had been detained between September 2015 and December last year for instigating juveniles to steal, the report said.
What surprised procurators in Shanghai during their investigation is that none of the four children involved in the thefts was the offspring of either woman. They had been “rented” from families in Yongzhou that have more than one child.