PANews reported on June 10 that, according to the Beijing Evening News, the Haidian District Procuratorate in Beijing announced a fraud case in which a 60-year-old woman, Meng, impersonated a 20-year-old girl to swindle a young man online, defrauding him of more than 200,000 yuan. She then invested the money in leveraged cryptocurrency trading, ultimately losing everything. She was sentenced to four years in prison.
Meng fabricated the identity of her "adopted daughter, Xiao Hong," and posed as a young woman to engage in an online romance with a young man. She repeatedly borrowed money under various pretexts, such as family illness and needing to study abroad for exams. The young man noticed that his "girlfriend's" behavior was old-fashioned and that the photos she sent of her living abroad were actually taken in a Chinese karaoke bar, so he reported her to the police. After being apprehended, Meng confessed that she had invested all of the more than 200,000 yuan she had swindled in cryptocurrency leveraged trading, resulting in a margin call and significant losses due to a market crash. The court sentenced Meng to four years in prison for fraud, imposed a fine, and ordered her to reimburse the swindled money.