Recently, in a hotel room in Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province, a hidden camera was discovered, leading to the hotel staff surrounding the whistleblower at the local police station after the report was made. This incident has attracted attention and made it to the hot search list. In recent years, hotels, guesthouses, and key universities in mainland China have been exposed numerous times for secretly installing cameras, revealing hidden dark profit chains.
According to reports from Upstream News and China News, millions of fans’ popular online influencer “Truth Never Lies – Anti-fraud” recently exposed in a video on social media that several hidden cameras were found in several hotels in Xinhua District, Shijiazhuang.
The video shows that the influencer received a tip-off from a netizen stating, “There is a hidden camera installed in the apartment rooms at Huaqiang Plaza in Xinhua District, Shijiazhuang.” Subsequently, they went to the implicated apartment with friends, used equipment to locate a room containing a hidden camera device installed on the air conditioning duct. With consent from the two women staying in the room, they found the hidden camera device concealed on the air conditioning duct and immediately reported it to the police.
The influencer, “Truth Never Lies – Anti-fraud,” revealed the whole process of the incident in a post on the 25th, stating, “In July, I discovered a hidden camera in Huaqiang Plaza in Shijiazhuang. They gathered a crowd to make me sign a non-disclosure agreement. Considering their difficulties in doing business, plus the intervention of a certain leader, I agreed. However, the condition was for them to self-inspect the cameras and prevent such incidents from happening again.”
“However, in September, I received a submission from a fan saying that there were still cameras present there. So, I led the team back to the scene, and what happened in the video occurred. Remembering the experience from July, they tried the same approach again, using both hard and soft tactics to prevent exposure, surrounding the local police station from around 9 p.m. to around 4 a.m.”
He continued, “Eventually, my team and I started editing the video in the police station to try to use public opinion for escape. Subsequently, their representatives repeatedly approached me for negotiation, and I made it clear that I must expose the incident. With some persuasion from their leaders, they gradually retreated, and we took the opportunity to escape. We found our vehicle damaged, tires deflated, license plate altered, so we forcefully drove away with a damaged rim and replaced the tire at a safe location.”
According to the influencer, the relevant department in Shijiazhuang had previously called him in for a meeting citing the need to maintain the city’s image, and he publicly apologized to the people of Shijiazhuang on Weibo on behalf of his team.
This incident has garnered attention on social media. A Weibo user, “Zero Time Comment,” commented, “In the works released by the parties involved, this is not the first time they have been besieged. When hearing about hidden cameras, businesses often react not with shock, immediate removal of equipment, or finding the culprits, but by thinking of ‘silencing the problem-raiser’ first, which is hard to explain and believe. Things out of the ordinary must have reasons behind them. Why do all the businesses have a unanimous external approach? Whose interests did the whistleblower threaten by exposing this? Is there a black industry chain involved? Why did the businesses not remove the cameras but rather deal with people?”
In recent years, secret filming incidents have been frequent in mainland China, with hotels and guesthouses being the “hardest-hit areas” for such actions, and even key universities are not exempt.
According to a report by the China Business News, on September 22nd, netizens reported the discovery of a camera in the restroom of the library on the Jiangning campus of the Hohai University in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province. According to leaked videos online, a black camera was found at the bottom of a blue trash can in the restroom, with a cut made by a knife where the camera was placed. In the video, after removing the plastic garbage bags from the trash can, the camera was still in operation.
Hohai University in Nanjing is a key national university directly under the Ministry of Education of the Chinese Communist Party. When a reporter from Dahe Daily asked the Publicity Department of the Hohai University Committee if the incident had been reported to the authorities, they responded by asking, “What would reporting this incident do?”
In October 2023, a couple in Guangxi complained to the media that they had stayed in a hotel in Nanning for three months a year earlier and suddenly received secretly filmed videos and personal information, including five private videos of themselves and their identity card numbers and phone numbers from a stranger. When they returned to this hotel, they found that the hidden camera had not been removed. The hotel involved claimed they were also victims.
In November 2022, a woman named Wang in Loudi City, Hunan Province, was secretly photographed with private photos when she stayed alone in a hotel, leading to a stranger demanding 100,000 yuan from her by threatening to publish the photos to her workplace and friends. The hotel involved subsequently reported the incident to the police.
In January 2022, a hotel room in Huzhou, Zhejiang, was reported to have installed cameras, with the recorded videos uploaded to adult websites for profit. The group involved in the secret filming and selling operation consisted of seven individuals who had installed cameras in multiple cities inside and outside Zhejiang province.
In December 2021, a black market for secretly filming and selling cameras was exposed in Changzhou, Jiangsu, involving 37 suspects across Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou provinces. The Xinhua Daily reported that former guesthouse owner Xiao Na revealed that some guesthouse owners earned a daily income in the five digits by selling secretly filmed videos or live streaming. These individuals usually have teams, forming a mature industry chain – guesthouse owners providing filmed videos and live streaming resources and others selling them online.
Reporters from the Xinjing Daily conducted a secret investigation and found a large number of groups in a private chat application sharing and selling private pictures and videos. Many users pay to join these groups to watch or obtain these videos.