One Shanghai Driver Had Over 200 Minor Crashes. Police Say They Were Deliberate.

A car changes lanes. There is a small scrape. The amount of money involved seems modest, and the other driver would rather settle it than spend time dealing with an accident.

According to Shanghai police, one man allegedly turned that ordinary-looking encounter into a repeated source of income: more than 200 incidents since 2025, involving over RMB 600,000.

The collisions looked unremarkable when viewed individually. What stood out was how often the same people appeared in accident and insurance records.

The pattern behind the scrapes

On October 23, Shanghai's traffic police told The Paper that a targeted operation had led to the arrest of six people suspected of staged-collision fraud since September.

Investigators compared traffic accident records with insurance claims and found unusually high accident frequencies. In many of those incidents, the same individuals had been treated as the parties who were not at fault.

One suspect, identified by his surname Zhu, allegedly drove around Huangpu, Xuhui, Pudong and other parts of the city, looking for vehicles changing lanes and deliberately creating minor contact.

Police said he committed up to five incidents in a single day. Individual demands ranged from several hundred yuan to around RMB 1,000.

The relatively small sums and familiar-looking accident scenarios helped the encounters pass without raising immediate suspicion among many of the other drivers.

One officer described footage that appeared to show an ordinary lane-change accident with very slight contact. The other motorist had not called police. Investigators, however, linked Zhu to more than 200 incidents.

To build the case, police reviewed road-camera footage, collected accounts from the affected drivers and examined insurance-claim documents. Police said Zhu initially denied deliberately causing the collisions but later admitted his conduct. He has been placed in criminal detention, and the case remains under investigation.

A different version on two wheels

The operation also uncovered a separate suspect in Minhang, identified as Cui, who worked as a food-delivery rider.

According to police, he used situations in which motorists had restricted visibility—turning, pulling over or passing through narrow roads—to move close to vehicles and stage incidents.

In one case at about 11 p.m. on September 16, near Yishan Road and Longming Road, a car was preparing to pull over. Police said Cui approached it, rocked his electric bicycle and fell without the vehicles making contact.

He allegedly pretended to be injured and claimed his phone had been damaged, seeking compensation for injuries, lost earnings and the device. The incident resulted in an insurance payment of RMB 6,000.

Investigators later found that the phone was already broken before the encounter. Police said Cui admitted repeatedly using the damaged-phone claim to increase the amount requested.

He also allegedly encouraged drivers to settle privately rather than follow the normal assessment and insurance process, taking advantage of their wish to avoid trouble and delays. Cui has also been placed in criminal detention, with the case still under investigation.

For investigators, the breakthrough came from looking beyond a single roadside encounter. What appeared routine in one video became suspicious when repeated across the records.