"Name?"
"Gostrovsky."
"Occupation before arrest?"
"Unemployed."
"Confess your crimes."
"I claimed to have obtained approval from Nie's City Hall, falsely claiming that City Hall would build a second-class highway from Nie's City to the Cambel Mine, and colluded with Justin to use fake contracts to swindle investments."
"How many contracts did you sign?"
"Fifty-eight."
"How many?!"
"Fifty-eight. Including land development contracts, farm acquisition contracts, raw material supply contracts, billboard bidding contracts, construction crew food supply contracts, and so on. Fifty-eight in total."
"Other than contract fraud, did you commit any other crimes?"
"Of course! I used fake planned route maps to deceive real estate developers. Wherever the road went, property prices rose. Privately, I told them I had deep connections with people from the road design company and the risk assessment company, and could make slight adjustments to the route. Then the money came rolling in, impossible to stop. I was targeting their house-flipping mentality, making them hand me money with smiles on their faces."
"Those investors were really that stupid? They practically lined up to give you money?"
"I had contracts! I used fake contracts to pass off real contracts, then used real contracts to scam even more real contracts. The more contracts there were, the more real it all seemed. Under my arrangements, every boss who came to discuss cooperation would always run into other bosses there to discuss cooperation. No matter how they looked at it, it was a steaming hot bun. In the end, I made the whole affair vivid and convincing, a chaos of fakes that looked real."
"Did you ever think about how it would end?"
"Ending it was easy too. I just had to turn all those former 'fakes' into 'real' ones. Other people got permits before launching projects. I got the project