Chinese fugitive wore ‘getting away with it’ hoodie. Not so fast, say police

A fraud suspect in eastern China was detained after arousing police suspicions by wearing a top with a logo that read “getting away with it”.

The 19-year-old, identified only by his surname Zhong, was spotted at a railway station in Yiwu in Zhejiang province on Monday as he said farewell to a friend, Thepaper.cn reported on Thursday.

Suspicious police officers decided to run an identity check and discovered that he was wanted for fraud.

The man was a former employee of a loan company and, along with two others, was wanted on suspicion of defrauding clients, an officer from Jiandong police station told the news portal.

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“The two conspirators have already been detained. And on the 17th, he was put into the police system’s online search list. That very day, he was caught by railway police,” said officer Chen Hao.

Zhong was reported to have told police that the alleged crime was committed earlier this year, and he thought he would be fine by now.

He said he had bought the black hoodie recently because he thought it would show he had a strong personality.

In a video clip released by The Beijing News on Thursday, the man, now in police custody, said it never occurred to him that piece of clothing would bring him trouble.

“I just saw it on an online shop [and bought it] … I didn’t expect all this,” he said.

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In late October, a 15-year-old boy wearing the same hoodie was seized by police while trying to steal an electric bicycle in Liuzhou, Guangxi region.

He confessed to police that he had worked with three other teenage boys to steal several dozen batteries from electric bikes.

The boy said he thought the top was “cool” and thought police would not be able to catch him, local newspaper Nan Guo Jin Bao reported.

Luckily for him, under-16s cannot be prosecuted for theft under mainland Chinese law, so the police had to let him go.