Chinese anti-fraud app has ability to track Tibetans – Report

A new report says that a Chinese app, originally made to stop fraud, might be used to watch over Tibetans.

The Tibet research groups found out that the app could spy on people by looking at their texts, internet history, and personal information.

They also claimed that some Tibetans were being made to get the app.

Rights groups are saying that rules in Tibet have gotten stricter in the past few years, making an already tightly controlled area of China even more restricted.

In recent years, the government has increased watching and controlling what people do, especially during the pandemic.

Regions like Tibet and Xinjiang are being closely watched because they are politically sensitive. Beijing has been worried about regions wanting to break away for a long time. They have started to crack down even more under the rule of Xi Jinping, who has stressed the importance of staying together as a country.

The new report talks about the National Anti-Fraud Centre app that came out in 2021. It was done by Turquoise Roof and Tibet Watch.

The report didn’t have proof that the app was specifically trying to track Tibetans. But it did say that the app supports a lot of spying and could help the Chinese government control them.

The National Anti-Fraud Centre created an app to help stop scams. It can find fake texts and calls and lets people report scams. It also helps people get help from the police fast. China has been working hard to stop internet and phone scams in the past few years.

Turquoise Roof checked the app and found that some parts of it could be used for spying.

The app can watch for new text messages and see the calls and websites that have been visited. The spyware can record passwords and take pictures to collect information about the user and their environment.

The report said that the face recognition feature can also be used to collect a lot of information about Tibetans to keep track of them better.

One way is by making Tibetans download the app. Last year, a refugee said he was stopped by police on his way home from school and was told to put the app on his phone.

Issues with the app being downloaded without permission came up shortly after it was released, when it was put on around 200 million phones.

Some local government offices required their workers to download the app. Others had to use the app to sign their children up for school or get ID cards. The Financial Times reported this.

The newspaper also talked to people who said the police contacted them because the app showed they had looked at foreign financial news sites like Bloomberg.

Turquoise Roof found out that the Chinese government is keeping a big list of Tibetan people who they think could cause problems. The database used a software from a company in the US called Oracle.

They said it was okay to guess that any information collected by the anti-fraud app could be used in this database.

The report asked the Chinese government to make stronger privacy rules and to look into claims of forcing people to download the app.

It asked companies and governments around the world to not support China’s mass surveillance programs.


Beijing has had strong control over Tibet since it sent soldiers in 1950 to enforce its power over the area.

Some people who work to make changes say that China restricts Tibetans from traveling freely by controlling their passports. China also closely watches how Tibetans communicate with others outside of their country.

Tibet Watch has recorded many cases of Tibetans getting taken by the police because of what they said on WeChat. They also found that some accounts and words that were seen as too political were shut down or removed.

China has used a lot of surveillance in Xinjiang to control the Uyghur people, not just in Tibet.

In 2019, Human Rights Watch discovered that officials were using a system to watch and track where people in Xinjiang were going and what information they were sharing.

In the same year, some newspapers found out that border police were putting apps on people’s phones to watch them when they visited the area.