Ten suspects have been arrested for allegedly running a fake ticket service on the internet and profiting over 200,000 yuan (US$30,000) from the fraud, Shanghai police said on Friday.

Investigation began in March when police received a report from a university student who claimed that she paid 1,700 yuan to an online ticket seller for a ticket to the concert of a Chinese pop star, but the seller went out of touch soon after.

She first got in touch with the seller on weibo.com where they had a similar account name and avatar to that of damai.cn, a popular ticketing service in China, and was then instructed to pay by scanning a QR code sent to her in an SMS message, police said.

She was also asked to leave her name, ID card number and mobile phone number.

Police soon located the scammers in Danzhou City, Hainan Province, where they were caught about a month later.

The suspects have confessed that since January, they used weibo.com and WeChat to find customers who sought tickets to concerts, pretending to be the official damai.cn, and sent SMS messages to them from an SMS center.