Hired actors to play a family: a woman "twisted" her husband for money and a fake wedding (2 photos)

The man's suspicions were aroused when he accidentally saw a chat message on Xiaoyu's phone, where she complained that he "constantly asks to meet" and promised to "act according to the script."





In China, a married woman swindled money from a bachelor who wanted to marry her. She staged a scam, and hired actors played her and her family. So, the man went to the police and said that his fiancée was a fraud. The victim, identified only as Xin, from central China's Hubei Province, met a woman who identified herself as Xiaoyu after seeing his contact information in a wedding planning ad and contacted him in August 2022.

Xiaoyu, originally from eastern China's Jiangsu Province, confessed her love to Xin only a month after they first met online. When they began planning their marriage last year, she informed Xin that he would have to pay her family a bride price of 188,000 yuan ($26,000) in accordance with local customs.

In January last year, Xin bought 10,000 yuan worth of gifts for the bride's family and wanted to meet them, but the woman claimed to be ill and postponed meeting her family.

Over the next year, she repeatedly extorted money from her husband for her mother's surgery and gifts for her sister, all the while refusing to meet her husband offline. Over the course of a year, the man in love transferred more than 220,000 yuan to Xiaoyu.

In April, Xiaoyu finally agreed to meet Xin and introduce him to her parents and sister. At the meeting, the man found that his lover looked "different", to which she responded that her photos online were very "photoshopped".

A month later, Xin's family met with the bride's family to discuss wedding arrangements, during which Xin transferred 40,000 yuan to the wedding preparations.



Xin's suspicions were aroused when he accidentally saw a chat message on Xiaoyu's phone, where she complained that he "constantly asks to meet" and promised to "act according to the script."

Xiaoyu herself claimed that someone else was using her account. The next day, her sister Xiaomao met with Xin in person and told him that Xiaoyu was "depressed" and asked him to break up with her.

Xin then decided to talk to his fiancée and went to her home. He called her when he was already near the house. At the scene, the man saw that Xiaoyu's "sister" had picked up the phone. So he realized that Xiaomao was the "bride" he thought he had been dating for two years.

The groom went to the police, who found out that the scammer was a married woman named Zhou. She hired actors to portray her family and herself to continue to extort money from Xin.

In all, she swindled the man out of 480,000 yuan (US$65,000).