Don't Drag Yourself Down: Legal and Financial Safety

If you flee, the accident is counted as entirely your fault by default. Your driver's license is revoked, and you can never take the test again for the rest of your life. There is also a more practical layer: vehicle damage insurance and third-party liability insurance pay nothing for hit-and-run, so compensation of several hundred thousand yuan comes entirely out of your own pocket. Staying at the scene to help and call the police costs at most an hour or two.

The short stretch of time right after the money goes out is the only window. During it, the police can make an emergency payment stop and a rapid freeze, and the bank must cooperate. Once the money has been moved on layer after layer and split up, it basically cannot be recovered. So call 110 or 96110 first; don't go checking or asking around on your own first. A call from 96110 is the police trying to talk you out of being scammed; answer it.

Whenever someone asks you to transfer money, share your screen, download an unfamiliar app, click a link or read out a verification code, hang up first, then call back on an official number to verify. The seven most common types are order-brushing for rebates, fake investment and wealth management, online loans, impersonating customer service, impersonating the police, procuratorate or courts, pig-butchering scams, and sexual-lure order-brushing; all of them want you to transfer money first. Recognizing them beforehand is far cheaper than chasing the money afterward.

Seeing a face or hearing a voice does not count as verification. Whenever a transfer is involved, hang up first, then call back on the old number saved in your own contacts, or ask someone you both know. If the other person says “the signal is bad” or “I'm in a meeting” and won't do a live video call, treat it as a scam outright.

From the very first time you are called in for questioning, you can hire a lawyer. When a lawyer asks to meet you, the detention center must arrange it within 48 hours at the latest, and the conversation is not listened in on. You may decline to answer questions that have nothing to do with this case.

Surrender can cut up to 40% off your sentence, and where the circumstances are relatively minor you can go unpunished outright. Confessing truthfully only after they come for you can still cut up to 20%. Running away and refusing to admit anything get you none of this. Counting on hiding for a few years until the case expires doesn't work either: once a case has been opened, the time you spend hiding does not count toward the limitation period for prosecution.

Driving after drinking means a 6-month license suspension and a fine of one or two thousand yuan. Do it again and it's detention plus revocation. Drunk driving means immediate revocation, no retaking the test for 5 years, and criminal liability for the crime of dangerous driving, which leaves a criminal record that affects political background checks and some professions. Insurance won't cover it either: if you drive after drinking, auto insurance pays nothing. “Just moving the car” also counts as driving.

Renting out, lending or selling your bank card, SIM card or payment account to someone else is illegal in itself. The fine is 1 to 10 times the illegal gains; with no gains, up to 200,000 yuan; in serious cases, 15 days' detention; it also goes into your credit record and your account functions are restricted. If you know they are using it for crime and still help them receive and transfer money, that is the crime of assisting information network crime (帮信罪), with up to 3 years.

You can check your own credit report online for free twice a year, and it takes ten minutes. Use the official website of the People's Bank of China Credit Reference Center or your mobile banking app; don't use third-party “credit check” apps, which are collecting your information. Negative records are kept for 5 years from the day the matter ended, after which they should be deleted. If you dispute something, you can raise it, and you must be given a written reply within 20 days.

Hitting someone means 5 to 10 days' detention and a fine of five hundred to a thousand yuan. Hitting someone as part of a group, hitting an older person, a pregnant woman, a child or a person with a disability, or hitting people repeatedly means 10 to 15 days' detention and a fine of one or two thousand yuan. Injuring someone to the level of minor injury makes it a criminal case, with up to 3 years; serious injury, 3 to 10 years. Two people hitting each other is not self-defense, and the one who strikes first almost always comes off worse. Retreating to where there are more people and calling the police works better than hitting back.

When someone is in the middle of harming you or someone else, if you act to stop them and injure them, you bear no criminal liability. If they are in the middle of a violent assault, a killing, a robbery, a rape or a kidnapping, injuring or even killing them is not excessive. But you may only hit the person who is attacking right now, and stop when they stop. Even if the final finding comes down on your side, a case may still be opened against you first and you may be locked up for a few days first.

On the legal route, the worst outcome is that you don't get the money back. Take revenge, and you still don't get the money back, and you pay for it with your own life. The Wuxi case: Xu X-jin did not get his graduation certificate and was unhappy with his internship pay; he attacked people with a knife, killing 8 and injuring 17, was sentenced to death, and has been executed. Unpaid wages go through complaints and arbitration; in 2024 this route recovered 8.65 billion yuan for 654,000 people nationwide.

Driving into a crowd or attacking people in a public place is convicted as endangering public safety by dangerous means. Even if not a single person is hurt, it starts at three years. If anyone dies, it is ten years or more, life imprisonment or death. The Zhuhai case: Fan Weiqiu, unhappy with how property was divided in his divorce, drove into a crowd of people exercising at a sports center, killing 35 and injuring 43; he was sentenced to death and has been executed.

The window from when such a thought appears to when someone acts on it is very short. Of 82 people who had attempted suicide, 47.6% said no more than 10 minutes passed from first having the thought to acting on it. So what you need is not to “think it through”, but first to put one step between yourself and the steering wheel, knives, the gas valve and ropes, and get through those ten minutes. Then call 12356.

If a family member says “nobody gets off easy” or “I'll take the kids with me when I go”, close relatives can take them straight to the hospital, and the hospital may not refuse to diagnose them. If they have already been violent, or something is clearly about to happen, hospitalization does not require their own consent. If you can't tell whether it's words said in anger or real, first call 12356 to ask, or call 110 and have the police come. Covering for them is not helping them.

Publicly insulting someone or spreading rumors to defame them means detention of up to 5 days or a fine of up to 1000 yuan; where the circumstances are relatively serious, 5 to 10 days' detention. Where the circumstances are serious, it constitutes the crime of insult or of defamation, with up to 3 years. Sharing does not get you off the hook. Conversely, when you are the target of online mob harassment, for insult and defamation you must in principle sue in court yourself, so screenshots, screen recordings and saved links are all down to you.

Once you sign, it counts, and a fingerprint counts just like a signature. “I didn't read it carefully” or “I thought it was something else” basically won't stand up in court. So spend a few more minutes reading from beginning to end, ask on the spot about anything you don't understand, and take photos for your records. Don't sign for others, don't sign blank paper, and write the purpose on any photocopy of your ID card. Electronic signatures and face-scan confirmations count as signing too.

Write the IOU in full: lender, borrower, amount, interest rate, term, repayment method, and both sides' signatures. Send the money by transfer, not cash; only a complete IOU makes it easy to sue. When you guarantee someone, check whether the words “joint and several” (连带) appear. With a general guarantee, it's your turn only after the creditor has first sued the borrower and enforcement has failed to recover the money. If it says joint and several liability guarantee, the creditor can come straight to you for the money.

The civil limitation period is 3 years, counted from the day you learn your rights have been harmed. Once it has passed, the court won't raise it on its own, but the other side only has to say “the limitation period has expired” in court and that is enough: the money still exists, you just can't get it back. Yet a single message demanding payment that leaves a trail can make those 3 years start over. Labor disputes run on a separate system, with a 1-year arbitration limitation period.

Putting your house in a company's name or transferring money to relatives and friends is exactly what the crime of refusing to enforce judgments (拒执罪) spells out, with up to 3 years, and 3 to 7 years where the circumstances are especially serious. Relatives, friends and companies who help hide the money and transfer title are treated as accomplices, and the money is recovered all the same. Refusing to report or falsely reporting assets can bring an individual a fine of up to 100,000 yuan and 15 days' detention. Genuinely having no money is not this crime.

First figure out whether your consumption is restricted or you are on the defaulter blacklist; these are two different things. There are only six grounds for being put on the defaulter blacklist, and the term is 2 years. In seven situations, including having fully performed, the court shall delete you within 3 working days. The high-spending ban bars nine kinds of spending, and riding a G-series high-speed train counts. If something is necessary for living or running a business, you can apply case by case.

Go to the platform first. Platforms have deposits and penalty rules, so they handle it fastest. Then call the police: being scammed out of 3000 yuan or more reaches the threshold for opening a fraud case; below the criminal standard, it is handled as a public security penalty, with 5 to 10 days' detention. If you want to go to court, an online shopping dispute can be filed in the court where you received the goods; small amounts go through small-claims procedure, which is decided within 2 months, and you can file online.

Once the money is handed over, in principle you can't get it back. A gift can be revoked at will only before it passes into the other person's name. After the transfer is complete, it can be revoked only in three situations: the other person seriously harms you or your close relatives, fails to support you when obliged to, or fails to perform agreed obligations. So before a large transfer, think it through: is this a loan or a gift?

Demanding money or property by means of a marriage is prohibited by law, and courts support its return. You can ask for it back if the marriage was never registered; if it was registered but the couple genuinely never lived together; or if paying the betrothal gift before the marriage left the side that paid in financial hardship. If the marriage was registered and the couple lived together, it is usually not returned. So pay the betrothal gift, the gold jewelry and the name-change money by transfer with the purpose in the memo. Whoever paid the money keeps the evidence, men and women alike.

Property from before the marriage is yours alone; it does not become joint property because the marriage has lasted many years. A couple can agree in writing that property from before and during the marriage each stays with its owner. One thing to watch: if you have agreed to add your spouse's name to a home, you can still back out before the registration is changed; once it is registered, it is theirs. At divorce, a spouse who hid money, transferred it, squandered it or fabricated debts can be given a smaller share or nothing.

A bigamous marriage is void. Someone who marries while already having a spouse, or who marries a person knowing that person already has a spouse, is sentenced to up to 2 years. Using marriage as a front to swindle money is prosecuted as the crime of fraud: a relatively large amount brings up to 3 years, a huge amount 3 to 10 years, an especially huge amount 10 years or more or life imprisonment. Before registering, look at the other person's ID card and the marital status on their household registration booklet.

Home appliance repairers must clearly display their rates, give a repair voucher and an invoice, must not falsely report faults, and must not deliberately swap out parts that work normally; serious cases are fined up to 30,000 yuan. All businesses must clearly mark their prices and must not add charges on top of the marked price. So before work starts, ask the price and which parts will be replaced; afterward, get the voucher and invoice, and keep the old parts. If you are overcharged, call 12315 first.

The law presumes the legal representative is the person who runs things; “I was only a name on paper and knew nothing” is not grounds for escaping liability. If the legal representative harms others while performing their duties, the company pays first, and after paying it can come back to you, as the one at fault, to recover the money. If you are already a figurehead, the Company Law (公司法) allows you to resign, and the company must name a new legal representative within 30 days.

The advice of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Department of Consular Affairs to citizens going abroad is: don't carry luggage or items for other people, especially prohibited items or things you don't know about. If drugs or smuggled goods really are found in your luggage, it is up to you to prove “I didn't know what was inside.” The same goes for accepting deliveries on someone else's behalf in China, especially when you are asked to pay up front and be refunded later.

If your dog injures someone, in principle you must pay whether or not you were at fault; only by proving that the other person acted intentionally or with gross negligence can you pay less. If the dog was off-leash, only “the other person acted intentionally” remains as a ground for reducing what you pay, and in more serious cases you may also be detained. If your dog has not had its rabies shots as required, you will be ordered to put it right and may be fined. If a dog of a banned aggressive breed injures someone, there is no ground at all for escaping liability.

Someone so drunk they are not clearly conscious, or asleep, has no capacity to express consent; having sex with them then counts as rape in law too, with a base sentence of 3 to 10 years. Afterward you will have almost no way to prove the other person consented at the time. The only reliable course is not to have sex, and when the drinking party breaks up, hand the person over to their own friends or family. For how age is determined, see Section 9, Item 18 (under 14).

Threatening “I'll go to the police” or “I'll send the photos to your employer” to make you pay is extortion. Don't pay a cent, don't delete a single record, report to the police right away; pay the first sum and there will be a second. If the other person really does send the photos out, that is one more crime on their side. Extorting 2000 to 5000 yuan or more brings up to 3 years; 30,000 to 100,000 yuan or more brings 3 to 10 years.

Fabricating facts to falsely accuse someone, intending to get them criminally prosecuted or given a public security penalty, is itself illegal. It brings detention of up to 5 days or a fine of up to 1000 yuan. In more serious cases, detention of 5 to 10 days. If it rises to a crime, it is the crime of false accusation, with up to 3 years. But misremembering or accusing the wrong person does not count; to hold the other person accountable, you have to prove they set out to frame you.

The threshold for conviction is written into the Criminal Procedure Law (刑事诉讼法): the evidence a verdict rests on must have been verified as true through legal procedures, and the evidence in the whole case, taken together, must also rule out reasonable doubt. If that cannot be done, the court should acquit. Confessions obtained by torture and witness testimony obtained by violence or threats should all be excluded and cannot be used as a basis for the judgment. After a judgment takes effect, you, your legal representative and your close relatives can still file a petition.

If you were detained or arrested and the case was then dropped, not prosecuted or ended in acquittal, you can apply for state compensation. The days you were held are compensated by the day: from May 18, 2026, 495.94 yuan per day, about 180,000 yuan a year. If the consequences were serious, a solatium for mental harm (精神损害抚慰金) is paid on top. If you did commit an offense and were not prosecuted only because the circumstances were minor, there is no compensation. Nor is there any if the limitation period for prosecution had passed, you were under age, or you yourself made a false confession.

If you are the victim, claiming compensation from the party who wronged you has a legal basis in itself, and does not automatically become extortion because “the price is high.” But the cost can be huge: Guo Li was first sentenced to five years for extortion and only later declared not guilty on retrial. So use channels that leave a record, don't go alone to talk at a place the other side picks, and don't say “pay me” and “then I won't go public” as a single condition.

On the spot, do three things first: turn on the platform's protection settings, save the content with the quick evidence-capture feature, then report it through the quick-report entry. After that, you can ask a court for an injunction to make them stop first. You can also take them to court yourself, and if gathering evidence is hard you can ask the police to help. Where the consequences are especially serious and the impact is egregious, the procuratorate prosecutes, and you do not have to supply the evidence yourself.

All four doors are closed. Buying insurance that pays on death for a family member behind their back makes the contract void. If the policyholder intentionally causes the insured person's death, the insurer does not pay. Someone who intentionally kills the person they would inherit from loses the right to inherit. The Criminal Law (刑法) also lists this kind of insurance fraud as a separate clause, punished together with the crime of intentional homicide as multiple crimes, up to the death penalty. You get not a cent.

When you report to the police, get the case-acceptance receipt on the spot; it is your only proof that you reported. If the police decide not to open a case, they should give you a written notice of the decision not to open a case. If you disagree, you can apply for reconsideration within 7 days, and if you still disagree, apply for review within another 7 days. You can also go to the procuratorate and ask it to supervise the police on opening the case.

“Spending a little money to make it go away” is a crime in its own right under the Criminal Law, and the one who took the money is not the only one who gets caught. Bribery brings up to 3 years. Serious circumstances bring 3 to 10 years; especially serious ones, 10 years or more or life imprisonment. Bribing supervisory, administrative law enforcement or judicial officers also falls in the tier the law explicitly punishes more heavily. If you gave money because you were extorted and did not get any improper benefit, it is not bribery.

Loans, debts, compensation, refunds, labor disputes: if something was settled on the phone but nothing was left on record, a few months later the two sides may each tell a different story. You can record a conversation you take part in; not telling the other person beforehand does not by that fact alone make it unusable as evidence. What you must not do is eavesdrop, spy on other people's privacy, break into someone's home to record secretly, or threaten someone into speaking.

If you only shoot a close-up of one scratch on a car or one object on the ground, in a few days nobody will know where it originally was. First shoot a wide-view clip that takes in the intersection, the building number, the vehicles, the people and the surroundings, then shoot how things are positioned relative to each other, and last the details. If things or vehicles have to be moved, shoot first if you can. Keep the original photos and videos on your phone; don't keep only a copy that has been passed through a chat app.

Of all women killed worldwide, more than one third are killed by a partner, often as the end point of long-term domestic violence. Among women who have all been beaten, those who have been choked are more than 7 times as likely to be killed later as those who have not. So if you are hit, call the police, then apply to a court for a protection order. The court usually has to respond within 72 hours.

Money owed at the gambling table is not protected by the courts. If a creditor lent money knowing the person was borrowing it to gamble, that money is not protected by the courts either. Money one spouse borrowed in order to gamble cannot be counted as a debt the couple repays together. Without a trial, a court cannot make the spouse who did not borrow bear liability for them.

The so-called “just do a face scan, just be a witness” is really borrowing from a bank in your name. You are the borrower, not the guarantor; once the money has been passed on to the person you know, the bank still comes to you for repayment. The broker deceived you, but as long as the bank did not know, you cannot revoke this loan contract. An “I'll repay it” pledge that your acquaintance writes for you does not bind the bank either.

UK data show that homes with door locks plus window locks have only one-twelfth the chance of someone getting in and stealing compared with homes with nothing installed. Add a motion-sensor light outside the door and it falls to one in thirty-odd. Installing only an alarm and nothing else shows no visible protection against burglary. This covers theft, not robbery while someone is home.