Chinese communities around the world are being targeted by fraudsters who take valuables from elderly women by convincing them that their loved ones are in danger.
After many scams on the streets of the United Kingdom (UK), the United States (USA), Australia, and Canada, the police are investigating these cases, and the victims' families are trying to find the scammers.
The scam that could be translated as "promised blessing" originates from China.
An elderly person, usually a woman of Chinese descent, is promised a blessing or spiritual healing in exchange for valuable objects and cash.
This scam requires multiple people, usually three women acting out a well-rehearsed script in Cantonese for an audience of only one spectator - the unsuspecting future victim.
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Mungni is a Chinese-Malaysian woman in her 60s who lives in London.
While she was going to a yoga class, in the street Harrow Road in West London, a crying woman approached her.
She asked her in Cantonese if Mungni knew any Chinese folk healers in that part of town, because her husband was ill.
Soon, another unknown woman appeared who claimed in Cantonese that she knew the healer, and offered to take them to him.
Mungni was touched and wanted to help the woman who looked very upset.
In a quieter side street, a third woman joined the group, claiming to be related to the vidar, and went to ask him if he could help.
When she returned after a fifteen-minute conversation with the healer, she had disturbing news.
Thanks to his powers, he saw that Mungni was also in danger.
Miraculously, he knew everything about her marital problems, the pain in her right leg - things that Mungni had not told these women.
But the next sentence petrified her.
"Your son will have an accident and die in the next three days."
The women told Mungna that the healer could give her a blessing that would protect her grown son.
They told her: "You should take a handful of rice and put as much gold and cash as you can in the bag."
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Mungni says she calmed down when the women promised her that her belongings would be returned after the vidar gave her blessing.
One of the women rushed home with Mungni to get her jewelry, and then they went to the bank to withdraw 4.000 pounds (4.800 euros) from her savings.
Valuables were placed in a plastic bag.
Mungni thinks that this is the moment when the bags were switched.
"It was lightning fast - he has such quick and nimble hands.
"I didn't notice anything," she recounts.
When she arrived home, Mungni was shocked to find only a brick, a piece of cake and two bottles of water in her black bag.
"That's when I froze, and then I said to my son, 'I think I've been tricked,'" says Mungni.
Some of the stolen valuables were kept by her family for generations, and she inherited them from her mother.
The Mungni experience is a textbook example of this type of fraud.
The BBC spoke to a number of victims whose stories are very similar: from a distraught stranger to claims of evil spirits threatening their relatives.
Even the name of the fictional seer is the same in many cases - "Mr. Koh".
All the victims were scammed within a few hours, and in Mungni's case, it was over in just three hours.
Anqi Shen is a professor of law at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, and a former Chinese police officer.
She believes that this type of fraud is the latest example of street crime that abuses people's beliefs, which has been going on for centuries.
"The Chinese have a custom of keeping valuable jewelry, especially pieces of gold, silver, jade, which are believed to have protective powers," explains Shen.
He says that the victims believe that after the blessing, such objects gain even greater power of protection.
Tujet van Huynh launched a social media campaign to raise awareness of these scams, after her mother was defrauded of tens of thousands of euros in May 2024.
Her mum was shopping in Upton, East London, when three women, who played the same roles as in the Mungni case, convinced her that her son was being threatened by evil spirits.
Over the past year, police in the US, Canada and Australia have issued warnings about such scams.
In the UK, mothers Mungni and Tujet reported the scams to London police, which announced that it was investigating a number of cases in Islington, a part of London.
Tujet received information about such frauds in other parts of London - Lewisham and Romford, as well as in Liverpool and Manchester.
She began the investigation by collecting footage from surveillance cameras in the part of town where the fraudsters approached her mother.
Tujet says that the video shows that her mother "followed every instruction to the point that she was like a zombie."
Her mother cannot explain how the crooks got her into the story of the vidar, because she is not superstitious or spiritual.
Tujet wondered if there might be something else involved in these scams.
She began to investigate whether there was some drug that could have made her mother fall under someone's influence while still remaining composed enough to retrieve her valuables from hidden places around the house.
"It could be a medicine called devil's breath," says Tujet.
Scopolamine, colloquially known as devil's breath, is used to treat motion sickness.
If taken in a certain dose, it can supposedly make a person very malleable and thus temporarily impair their free will.
It can be given to victims on the street without them realizing that they are drugged.
Tujet has no evidence that this drug was used in her mother's fraud or in any other case.
It is one of the few drugs that could have such a lucid effect, a used for robberies in Ecuador, France and Vietnam, as well as murders and sexual assaults in Colombia.
It is not known whether this drug is used in such scams in the UK, and even if it is, it would be difficult to establish.
The devil's breath is quickly expelled from the body, so when Tujet went to test her mother for the presence of this drug the next day, it was already too late.
Liza Mills, fraud expert at the victim support charity Victim Support, says there may be other reasons why this type of scam is so successful, and is designed to lure victims in quickly.
"People approach you who are similar to you in some way, in the sense that you notice that they look like you.
"These are women, about your age, speaking your language," she explains.
Currently, the scammers are still at large, but the families of some of the victims are determined to find them.
"I told the police that I am ready to do anything to catch these people," says Mungni.
What also disturbs her is that the fraudsters are Chinese.
"They are deceiving their own people," he adds.
Additional reporting: Austin Landis in Columbia
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