‘Traumatised’ China rural woman who uses sob story to gain sympathy online exposed as fraud

SHANGHAI (SCMP): A Chinese influencer with more than one million followers faked her backstory and claimed she was raised by a foster mother with severe mental illness, eventually resulting in police detention.

The woman, surnamed Xiao, used her account on Kuaishou – a TikTok-like platform – to tell her audience that she was 18 years old and living in a village in Liaoning in northeast China.