Chinese teacher tricked out of 20 million baht by online love scam
A 38 year old Chinese teacher has fallen victim to a devious online love scam where the fraudster tricked her out of over 4 million yuan, roughly 20 million baht. The South China Morning Post reports that despite numerous warnings from the police, the smitten teacher refused to believe she was being swindled by her handsome online lover.
The shocking online love scam story dates back to November last year when the unnamed teacher encountered an attractive man on the Internet. She was immediately infatuated and when he asked her to invest a significant amount of money in Bitcoin and blockchain, claiming it was a massively profitable venture, she willingly agreed. To finance her investment, she took out a loan from the bank, using her house as collateral.
In due course, the Shanghai police were alerted to large, unusual transactions occurring in the teacher’s bank account. Upon discovering that the money was being transferred to a fraudster, they attempted to contact the woman and persuade her to stop transferring money. However, the love-struck woman ignored their advice and continued to be deceived.
At the same time, the police repeatedly questioned the teacher about her bank transactions. Despite being interrogated over ten times, she consistently lied about the money transfers.
For example, the first time she denied transferring 640,000 yua (3 million baht), despite the police having evidence of the transaction. On another occasion, she falsely claimed that she transferred the money just to purchase an expensive luxury bag from the man. However, on March 9, the police summoned the teacher for yet another round of questioning, making it their twelfth meeting.
This time, she contacted the police herself, tearfully confessing that she met the man online and was convinced that he was genuine after seeing his pictures and videos. She was unaware that she was a victim of a crime involving the creation of fake profiles on social media, reported KhaoSod.
In recent years, China has cracked down on online fraud by developing applications to prevent scams, blocking suspicious phone numbers and messages, and introducing new legislation to control telecommunications and online fraud last year.
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