The HR manager of a Shanghai technology company was imprisoned for defrauding his company of millions of dollars by “hiring” dozens of fake employees and collecting their salaries.

The People’s Procuratorate of Minhang District, Shanghai recently released a “White Paper on the Prosecution of Duty-Related Crimes by Company and Enterprise Personnel in Minhang District” featuring a list of duty-related crime cases involving enterprise personnel handled in 2024, one of which attracted the attention of newspapers all over the country. Back in 2022, employees in the finance department of an unnamed Shanghai technology company discovered something strange: Xiao Sun, an employee who had been with the company for half a year and had perfect attendance throughout that whole period, seemed to be a complete mystery to everyone. No one had ever seen them in person or knew anything about them for that matter. The investigation that followed uncovered a massive fraud orchestrated by a single HR manager.

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Unable to offer attractive wages, a Japanese tech company has been trying to attract new talent by offering ingenious benefits such as free alcoholic drinks at work and hangover leaves.

Since the burst of the Japanese economic bubble in the early 1990s, the Japanese economy has been stagnating along with employee salaries. Even though some corporations have announced plans to increase starting wages in hopes of attracting new talent, small and medium-sized companies simply don’t have that option because their budgets don’t allow it. In order to compete with big players, they have to think outside the box and offer appealing and sometimes unorthodox benefits to potential employees. One small technology company in Osaka recently went viral in the Land of the Rising Sun by offering its staff free alcoholic drinks during work hours and hangover leaves to clear their heads.

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A Chinese company is being accused of tricking hundreds of employees into conducting illegal activities so it could then fire them without severance pay.

Wuhan CITIC Design Institute, a company based in Wuhan, Central China’s Hubei Province, recently found itself at the center of a huge scandal, after several prominent news outlets reported that it had allegedly fired around 200 senior employees after accusing them of crimes one of its managers had lured them into committing. Apparently, the company had been looking for ways of getting rid of senior employees with high salaries without having to offer any financial compensation packages, so it had one of the senior managers lure such employees to various bars and clubs under the pretext of “after-work relaxation” where they were tricked into engaging in illegal activities.

Photo: Mohammed Hassan/Pixabay

According to some of the tricked employees, the manager set them up with sex workers and encouraged them to interact with them, while others claim that they engaged in gambling and even intentionally lost some money to their superior to maintain a good relationship with him, only to later realize that they had been lured into a trap.

After gathering dirty evidence on the employees, the manager would report everything to the company, and their contracts would be terminated without any compensation. Some Chinese sources claim that as many as 200 employees lost their jobs this way.

The company’s tactic was fiercely criticized online, with some social media users pointing out that the terminated employees would have a very difficult time trying to find other jobs because of their record of illegal activities. So not only did the employer fire its senior employees without severance pay, but it also compromised their chances of getting a job someplace else.

Although this level of trickery is rare among Chinese employers, finding ways to fire employees without financial compensation is definitely not! Companies are known to dig through their staff’s criminal records hoping to find any illegalities committed in the last five or ten years to use as an excuse to fire them. Some go as far as faking tempting job offers from other companies to trick ‘problematic’ employees into quitting.

Chinese prosecutors recently filed lawsuits against at least 16 companies accused of requiring female jobseekers to undergo pregnancy testing.

Chinese law explicitly prohibits employers from carrying out pregnancy tests as part of pre-employment examinations, but some companies are so worried about the costs of maternity leave and benefits that they prefer to make sure the women they hire are not pregnant. Earlier this month, prosecutors in the Tongzhou district of Nantong, China’s Jiangsu Province, announced that it had sued 16 companies for illegally testing female job applicants for pregnancy without even formally informing them about it. Their investigation revealed that companies violated women’s right to equal employment opportunities, as at least one candidate was rejected after it was revealed that she was pregnant.

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A French woman is taking telecom giant Orange to court for “moral harassment and discrimination at work,” accusing the company of paying her for 20 years without giving her any tasks.

Laurence Van Wassenhove was recruited as a civil servant by France Telecom in 1993 before the company was taken over by Orange. Her original employer knew that she was hemiplegic – partial paralysis of the face and limbs – from birth and suffered from epilepsy, and offered her a position adapted to her medical conditions. She worked as a secretary and in the HR department until 2002 when she asked to be transferred to another region of France. Her request was approved, but her new workplace was not adapted to her needs, and an occupational medicine report confirmed that the position was not suited for her. Despite this, Orange allegedly failed to make any adjustments to her job, preferring to pay her full salary for the next 20 years, without giving her anything to do.

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A Chinese advertising agency is being accused by former employees of moving its offices from the city to a remote mountain area to force them to quit and avoid paying them compensation.

In what has been described as one of the most extreme tactics to convince employees to resign, an advertising company based in downtown Xi’an City, China’s Shanxi Province, allegedly moved its offices to a rural mountain area with very limited transport options. The accusations were made by a former employee who claimed to be part of a large part of the staff to leave the company due to the new working conditions. The man, known only as Chang, said that the company notified them that they would have to travel to a new location in the Qinling Mountains, which required a two-hour commute (one way), with very limited options for those without a personal car.

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A Chinese woman has been charged with fraud after it was revealed that she was employed by 16 different companies at the same time, but she never really showed up for work at any of them.

The woman, identified as Guan Yue (pseudonym) by Chinese media, had reportedly been juggling over a dozen employers and collecting paychecks for at least three years, without actually getting any work done for any of them. She and her husband, who is also a suspect in this case, allegedly kept a very tight record of employers, her exact role at each company, the date she had started working for each of them, and the bank account details provided for the woman’s monthly salary. Guan Yue would constantly be looking for new employers, and when going to new job interviews, she would take photos and send them to current employers as proof that she was meeting with clients. Believe it or not, the fraud worked flawlessly for years, allowing Guan Yue to buy an expensive apartment in Shanghai.

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A Hungarian man temporarily became a rich man, after the company he worked for accidentally paid him 367 times more than he had actually earned. And when the employer asked for the money back, he refused to pay.

The unnamed man, who hails from Hungary’s Somogy County, briefly worked for a company in Kaposvár but his employment was terminated during the trial period. For his short stint at the company, he stood to earn 92,549 forints, which amounted to 238 euros ($260), but in a feat of incredible generosity, his employer wired him 367 times that amount. Actually, it was just a huge mistake caused by the fact that the man had provided an Austrian bank account, so the salary had to be paid in the local currency, euros. Only instead of converting the forints to euros, they sent the lucky man 92,549 euros instead…

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An Italian professor who was recently fired for around 20 years of absence out of 24 years of service at schools near Venice has vowed to contest her recent firing by the Ministry of Education.

51-year-old Cinzia Paolina De Lio, a secondary school teacher who specializes in history and philosophy, became famous in her home country of Italy for managing to skip work for a total of 20 years out of the last 24 years of service at a number of schools around Venice. De Lio was originally sacked in 2017, after an inspection found her to be “unprepared” and “inattentive” in class, but she appealed the decision, and a judge reinstated her the following year. She continued to provide all sorts of excuses to miss work until Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation decided that her original termination had been justified, especially since she had been absent from the classroom for most of her two-and-a-half decades as a school professor.

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A 29-year-old man who has been living in a tent in an abandoned parking lot for 200 days has become the newest symbol of China’s increasingly popular ‘lying down’ culture.

At the end of 2018, Li Shu quit his job in Sichuan Province and began spending most of his time chilling in his rented apartment. The 29-year-old quickly realized that, with no income whatsoever, he would quickly go through all his savings, so he cut his daily expenses to just 10 yuan ($1.5) per day. Even so, after years of having to pay rent, it became painfully obvious that he would either have to find a way to make money or move out. Since the first option wasn’t even considered, he sold most of his belongings, bought a 400 yuan ($57), and decided to continue his relaxed lifestyle in the great outdoors, among the debris of an abandoned parking lot. He has been living there for 200 days, and has no plans of joining the rat race of life anytime soon.

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An IT specialist who has been on sick leave with no obligation to work since 2008 recently tried to sue their employer for not giving them a pay raise.

Ian Clifford, a ‘medically retired’ IT specialist who has been paid a £54,000 ($67,500) yearly salary as part of his disability plan with his employer, tech giant IBM, recently tried to sue the American company for ‘disability discrimination’, claiming that his salary was not ‘generous enough’ to keep up with inflation. Mr. Clifford has not done any work for the company in the last 15 years but will continue to receive his yearly salary until retirement or death, as per IBM’s disability plan. Despite this, the IT worker feels that he has been treated unfairly by his employer, and he is attempting to take the company to court for a pay raise.

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A Spanish woman recently lost a court battle against the company that fired her for allegedly posting twerking videos on TikTok while on paid leave of absence due to severe back pain.

The Superior Tribunal of Justice in Spain Castilla y Leon region recently upheld a supermarket’s decision to fire a cashier over a series of TikTok videos that were deemed “incompatible with her ailments”. The woman, referred to only as ‘Mrs. Piedad’ in the court papers, was reportedly an employee of Semark AC Group SA, the company behind the Lupa chain of supermarkets in Spain. She had been with the company since 2006, but at the end of January 2021 she went on an extended paid leave of absence, claiming that she was dealing with serious back problems. Her TikTok account said otherwise, though…

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The superstitious manager of a Chinese education company has come under fire for rejecting people with ‘5’ as the last digit of their phone number.

Chinese news outlets have been reporting the bizarre case of an education company in Shenzhen, Guangdong that allegedly rejects job applications of people who have ‘5’ as the fifth digit in their phone numbers, because the boss considers it back luck. Such applicants are advised to change their phone numbers if they are truly interested in working at the company. The bizarre condition, which has nothing to do with competencies or work ethics, has sparked a heated online debate in China, where superstition is still a big part of daily life.

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A Chinese company has sparked controversy online after it was reported that it forces employees to eat raw eggs as punishment for not meeting expectations.

It all started when a second-year university student surnamed Du took to social media to complain about his experience as an intern for a Zhengzhou technology company. He claimed that the said company had a bizarre rule where employees had to swallow raw eggs if they didn’t get enough orders in a set period of time or otherwise failed to meet management expectations. He claimed to have had his internship terminated after he refused to obey the rule, adding that management made him write down “personal reasons” as the reason for ending the internship to absolve the company of any liability.

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Japan has a culture of long working hours, but even in this generally tough and stressful working environment some companies stand out because of the complete disregard for their employees’ well-being. They are known as “black companies” and anyone who has ever wanted to experience what working for such organizations is like, without actually getting a job at one, can find out by applying for a special event called “The Black Holiday”.

It’s hard to imagine anyone ever wanting to experience what it’s like for a ‘black company’ is like, but especially so on Friday, November 23, when Japan celebrates Labor Thanksgiving Day. It’s a national holiday and a rare opportunity to enjoy a long weekend free of work-related stress. But I guess that’s exactly why the organizers of The Black Holiday chose this date for their special event. What better way to emphasize just how bad working for a black company can be then having you do it on your day off, right?

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