China's 'leftover women': "My mother calls me every week to ask if I have a boyfriend"
From military dancers to Chinese soldiers who break bricks with their heads
A married woman who
defrauded 18 lovers
to finance her luxurious lifestyle was arrested by the Shanghai police." This is the headline that has appeared the most these days in the event pages of the Chinese press. There is a few notes left to make The story is more vibrant: the woman,
a 29-year-old model,
dated all the men
simultaneously
since 2017, taking a cut of two million yuan, which in exchange is just over
300,000 euros.
Do not go, that the plot has more charm.
The scammer, surnamed Wu,
first seduced her suitors
and then asked them for money with various excuses: that she had to
get her cousin out of jail,
that she needed to pay for her father's expensive cancer treatment or that she wanted the money to cover a
tax bill
after inheriting a property.
Nothing was true, but it worked for him.
One of his mistresses even sold his house to fulfill the request of what he believed would be his future wife.
Wu promised her that they would marry.
What the guy didn't know, nor did any of the others, is that
this woman had already been married
since 2014 and even had two children.
One woman, many lives, 300,000 euros
The many invented lives that Wu recounted fell apart when she asked one of her boyfriends
to pose as her brother
and help her get rid of another man - another of her lovers - who, according to Wu, was chasing her because he wanted to charge her a fee. past debt.
That guy she wanted to get rid of was the one who sold her house to
lend her 150,000 euros.
The other of hers, surnamed Wang, had also left her
almost 100,000 euros.
Wang did not believe Wu's trick and asked for his money back.
After the many excuses she made,
Wang denounced
her in July to the Shanghai police, who uncovered a few days ago a case that has become a
'trending topic' on Weibo,
the Chinese brother of Twitter.
Romance scams proliferate in China
The Chinese press has long dubbed these plots
"romance scams."
They are habitual, repetitive and many of them
surreal.
Like the one that jumped in August:
romantic scammer goes out simultaneously with mother and son before
fleecing both of them almost 20,000 euros.
Another catchy headline launched by the Beijing Youth Daily.
The man, identified as Song, a farmer by profession,
met his mother,
Jang, in the northern province of Gansu and they began dating.
She would later introduce him to her son Li, whom Song promised to
find him a bride.
That's how it went.
One day Li was added to WeChat -the Chinese WhatsApp- by a young woman who was very interested in him.
She soon jumped the spark.
What good old Li did not know is that behind that WeChat profile that had beguiled him
was his mother's boyfriend.
All this happened in 2018.
For six years,
Song
continued dating Jang
-a carnal relationship-
while maintaining another
-cybernetic- relationship with Li.
She convinced the woman to lend her
10,000 euros
to pay the employees of her farm.
From the son, posing as the fictitious girlfriend, he asked for
another 9,000 euros
because he needed to pay the medical bills of his sick father.
In the end, Jang and Li realized that
something was wrong
and reported it to the police, who investigated the case and ended up catching the scammer.
In Beijing, a woman was arrested in May for
swindling a million and a half euros
from a man with whom she had
an online relationship
after courting him on a dating app.
Last year, in the southern Chinese city of Hangzhou, the police uncovered another scam involving a 20-year-old who had sent money to his young virtual girlfriend, who was actually the 46-year-old woman with whom he shared a flat and that
a false profile had been created on social networks
to defraud him.
Close to mainland China, in Taiwan, the autonomous island that Beijing considers a breakaway province, authorities said that between January and April this year, fake online lovers
defrauded 415 people
of more than two million euros.
The scams start with a man who sent €9,000 to his 'girlfriend' because she told him she wanted to renovate her house, and end with another guy who
transferred €27,000 to a virtual couple
living in Singapore whom he had known for three weeks. , because she promised to invest it in
"a new future together".
The romantic scam that serves as a study
In a study ("Process of victimization of online romance scams", which in Spain is better known as
"Nigerian scam")
presented by Chih Chin-wei, a researcher at the University of Taiwan, the case of a woman appears, Chen, who fell in love on Facebook with a supposed military doctor who worked in a Syrian refugee camp.
After three months of courtship, the man began to use all kinds of
false reasons to ask for money:
his life was in danger;
he needed a private flight to rescue his commander;
his commander's daughter needed surgery;
he needed surgery...
When the woman went to the police after realizing that she had been the victim of a scam, it was too late.
There was no trace left online of her military medic.
She swindled him almost 500,000 euros.
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