BEIJING (SCMP): A married Chinese woman was detained after hiring actors to impersonate her parents and herself in an elaborate scheme to defraud her blind date.
The police disclosed to the Chinese media outlet Jimu News that a man named Xin, from central China’s Hubei province, met a woman who identified herself as Xiaoyu. She saw his contact information in a wedding planning advertisement and reached out to him in August 2022.
Xiaoyu, hailing from eastern China’s Jiangsu province, professed her love to Xin just one month after their initial online meeting. As they began planning their marriage last year, she informed Xin that he needed to pay a bride price of 188,000 yuan (US$26,000) to her family, as per local customs.
In January last year, Xin brought gifts worth 10,000 yuan to her home to meet her parents, but she claimed to be ill and did not attend.
Over the following year, she repeatedly solicited money from him for her mother’s surgery and gifts for her sister, while consistently denying his requests to meet, citing that it was “inconvenient”.
To maintain the illusion, she sent him photos and spoke to him over the phone, which helped assuage his growing suspicions. Xin reported that he transferred over 220,000 yuan to Xiaoyu throughout the previous year.
In April, Xiaoyu finally agreed to meet Xin along with her parents and sister in his city. However, Xin noticed that she looked different from her photos, to which she responded that the images had been “beautified”.
A month later, Xin’s family met with hers to discuss wedding arrangements, during which Xin transferred additional funds and bought new clothes worth 40,000 yuan for them.
Suspicion arose for Xin when he accidentally discovered chat messages on Xiaoyu’s phone, where she complained about him “constantly asking to meet” and promised to “act according to the script”.
When confronted, Xiaoyu claimed that someone else had been using her account. The following day, her sister Xiaomiao met Xin in person and informed him that Xiaoyu was “depressed” and requested that he break up with her.
Determined to uncover the truth, Xin travelled to her city and called Xiaoyu, only to witness Xiaomiao answering the phone. It was then he realised that Xiaomiao was the “fiancée” he believed he had been dating for two years.
The police revealed that he had fallen victim to a scam orchestrated by an unemployed married woman with a child. The woman, surnamed Zhou, had hired actors to portray her family and herself to continue extracting money from Xin, using the funds to support her child.
The photos she had sent Xin were images of models she found online. In total, she defrauded Xin out of 480,000 yuan (US$65,000) before being detained by the police for further investigation in November.
“Life is more dramatic than television dramas,” commented one observer.
“Love is so blind that he was deceived for two years in a scam riddled with loopholes,” remarked another. - South China Morning Post
