Man arrested for online romance fraud
A man has been arrested for allegedly defrauding a woman out of 16.6 million yuan (US$2.5 million) through an online romance scam, Hongkou District People’s Procuratorate said on Monday.
The woman, Tang, met the suspect Chen, on an online dating website in November last year. Chen claimed to be a graduate of a prestigious Hong Kong university and an executive of a well-known multinational company, according to the prosecutors.
In December, Chen allegedly told Tang that he had discovered a loophole in a gambling website whereby more money would be registered than had actually been paid into the account. He convinced her to pay 680,000 yuan into his account, which then showed a balance of 800,000 yuan.
Within six days she paid 16.6 million yuan into the “account," but when she tried to withdraw her money the next day, she found the website no longer accessible and her online boyfriend had vanished, according to the prosecutors.
Tang went to the police, and police found that her money had been transferred to dozens of bank accounts from the bogus account. Chen, an unemployed person with no college education background at all, was caught in a residential complex in Dongguan, Guangdong Province on January 23.