Online love rat nabbed after swindling millions
- Source: Global Times
- [08:43 July 20 2010]
- Comments
A man stands beside a promotion board for a dating party organized by Jiayuan.com. Photo: IC
By Zhang Cao
A Shanghai man who cheated 3 million yuan ($442,803) out of seven women through a popular Chinese dating website over the last two years is being prosecuted by Pudong New Area Procuratorate.
Yu Min, 36, posed as an investment worker and graduate of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics to lure women on Jiayuan.com, Shanghai Morning Post reported Monday. In reality, he was only educated to middle-school level and had never worked in investment.
One of his victims, a Shanghainese woman surnamed Wang, got to know Yu through the website in April last year and began dating him three months later. Yu then borrowed 30,000 yuan ($4,428) from Wang, which he said he was going to invest in real estate near Yuyuan Garden.
In August of last year, Yu persuaded Wang to lend him a further 840,000 yuan ($123,984) to invest in the stock market, after discovering she had a large amount of money from selling her house.
Yu continued to borrow money from Wang, giving various reasons, including the illness of his grandmother and a friend getting in a traffic accident, to get a further 42,000 yuan ($6,199) in cash.
Wang tried several times to recover her money but always failed, and finally discovered that Yu had been lying. She reported the case to the police in January this year.
The police found that from May of 2008 to January this year, Yu had amassed 3 million yuan ($442,803) from seven women he had met through the website.
A spokesman for Jiayuan. com told the Global Times Monday that the site was just a platform for people to meet others. "We can't control what happens after that. Our users are all adults, and they should have the ability to identify a fraud," said Qu Wei, the head of the website's public relations department.
