Shocking scam from China has been reported where a married woman hired a series of actors, including one impersonating her, to bilk a man out of a big sum. The incident began on Aug 2022 when a man from Hubei Province was contacted online by a female person known as Xiaoyu, who claimed that the information was found about his wedding planning advertisement.
Over the following month, Xiaoyu declared love for Xin and convinced him to start planning their wedding. She asked her family for a bride price of 188,000 yuan (approximately Rs 22.1 lakh) that followed local traditions.
During January 2023, Xin went to meet her family, bringing gifts of 10,000 yuan (over Rs 1.15 lakh), but Xiaoyu had claimed sickness and did not attend. Despite multiple demands for funds, which included money to pay for her mother’s surgery and gifts for her sister, Xiaoyu refrained from meeting in the flesh and kept Xin assuaged by sending images and speaking to him via phone. At the tail end of the year, Xin had sent over 220,000 yuan (over Rs 25.7 lakh) to her account. In April 2024, Xiaoyu decided to meet Xin in his city but this time with her entire family.
However, on seeing her in person, Xin realized that she did not look the same as in the pictures. Xiaoyu said that those images had been “beautified.” Xin was becoming skeptical but continued buying gifts for her family, which cost him another 40,000 yuan, which is over Rs 4.5 lakh in clothes. He became even more suspicious when he read messages on Xiaoyu’s phone where she complained to a friend that he “constantly asks to meet” and promises to “act according to the script. She then said that her account had been hacked when confronted by Xin. Within a week, her “sister,” Xiaomiao, met Xin and requested him to end the relationship with Xiaoyu because she was depressed. In order to uncover the truth, Xin traveled to the city of Xiaoyu and caught Xiaomiao answering a call meant for Xiaoyu. It was then that Xin realized Xiaomiao was, in fact, the woman he had believed to be Xiaoyu for two years.
According to the Chinese media outlet Jimu News, the scammer, surnamed Zhou, was an unemployed married woman with a child. She had used the money to support her family, hiring actors to portray her relatives and sending Xin pictures of models she had found online. Zhou was arrested in November after she had successfully scammed Xin of 480,000 yuan (approximately Rs 55.3 lakh).
