Police have arrested 72 people suspected of running illegal overseas job rackets since June, the Ministry of Commerce said on Tuesday.

The Ministry of Commerce, together with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Public Security, and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce kicked off a national campaign in June to reduce the number of people falling prey to unlicensed job agents.

The campaign was launched after police received "76 complaints from laborers who were sent abroad with promises of jobs but learnt only once they landed in an alien country that the promises were false".

"Most of the laborers, all of whom paid a significant amount of money to job agents, found their job contracts were fake once they landed at the destination. There were others who realized they didn't even have legal permits to work in a foreign country, while some others' salaries turned out to be far less than what the agent had promised," an official of the Ministry of Commerce said.

Of the 76 cases, police have concluded investigations on 48, involving some 80 million yuan ($12 million), the ministry said. Since June 10, about 1,380 job contractors without valid licenses have been investigated.

"The crackdown aims to reduce the number of such labor disputes and safeguard the rights of Chinese workers abroad," Gao Hucheng, vice-minister of commerce, told the Xinhua news agency, adding the rights of Chinese workers overseas were "abused too often to ignore".

Yao Jian, the spokesman for the ministry, said some illegal job agents duped uneducated laborers mostly by either exaggerating the amount they would make working abroad or forging contracts for jobs that don't even exist.

The agents, Yao said, usually demand "no less than 100,000 yuan" for sending a laborer abroad with a job contract in hand. Yao also blamed several foreign enterprises that often broke clauses mentioned in the foreign workers' contracts.

Statistics from the Ministry of Commerce show that 252,000 Chinese workers went abroad for jobs from January to August this year, a 4.2 percent drop compared with the same period last year.

By the end of August, there were a total of about 766,000 Chinese laborers employed overseas.