A Chinese woman who conned almost 20 men out of millions in cash has now been arrested by the police. According to a report in South China Morning Post, Shanghai police arrested the woman, surnamed Wu, for allegedly conning suitors out of 2 million yuan to fund her luxury lifestyle.
At one point, Wu, 29, was dating 18 men simultaneously. None of them knew that she was legally married to a man surnamed Zeng since 2014. She even had a 2-year-old child with Zeng.
Wu’s modus operandi for conning the men was simple: she would become romantically involved with them and promise to marry them. She even had pre-wedding photo shoots done with a few men to convince them of her intentions.
Once her suitors were convinced that Wu really intended to marry them, the demands for money would begin. Wu would cook up excuses and request the men to send her money. Sometimes she pretended that she needed cash for her father who had cancer, sometimes she needed money for bailing a cousin out of jail, and sometimes she had to pay tax after inheriting property.
Using these cooked-up excuses, Wu would extract money from her unsuspecting suitors. Her routine was so convincing that some men took out loans to meet her demands, and one even sold his home.
However, when a few of them became suspicious at Wu’s repeated refusal to register their marriage and began demanding that she pay them back, Wu began a pyramid scheme. She would borrow money from new boyfriends to pay back older ones.
Her scheme began to unravel at the beginning of this year when she asked one of her boyfriends, surnamed Wang, to pose as her brother. She asked Wang to deal with another man, named Li, who she claimed was hounding her over unpaid taxes.
“The man asked me when we could return the money to him. He said he is short of money and he had already sold his house,” Wang later told police. “I instantly became suspicious of Wu. How could it be possible that a person who pushed others to pay taxes had sold his own house?”
It soon emerged that Li had sold his house to lend 1 million yuan to Wu. Wang, who had himself lent 900,000 yuan to Wu, approached the police in July this year.
Police in Shanghai tracked down Wu to the rented flat she shared with her husband. The full extent of her scam came to light after she was questioned by cops and she was arrested thereafter.
