“Why would he lie to me? That’s impossible,” Huang said on the programme from Jiangxi TV. “The whole country knows. Everybody who uses Douyin knows [that he loves me].”

Short video apps are an internet staple in China, where hundreds of millions of people flip through endless video streams every day on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.

As Huang’s story shows, these users are no longer just tech-savvy youngsters. The app is also increasingly attractive to China’s elderly population, opening the doors to a unique but now prevalent scam involving celebrity impersonators.

The fake Jin Dong videos are just some of the many celebrity videos that certain Douyin users created specifically to draw in elderly fans and cajole them into buying products or joining investment schemes. Others celebrities used in such videos include CCTV host Dong Qing and Jack Ma, co-founder of Alibaba, the parent company of the South China Morning Post.

The videos are made using footage of celebrities dubbed with flirtatious, sweet-talking voice tracks generated by computers. They are also accompanied by colourful text and backgrounds that are considered appealing to older users.

The videos are far from the sophisticated deepfakes that might be expected to fool the casual viewer. They are so crudely made that digital natives are unlikely to take them seriously. But they have successfully fooled many older internet users who are spending more time online.

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“Dear older sister, I have been texting you. Why are you not replying?” Jin Dong appears to say in one close-up video, although the computer-generated voice is not synced with Jin’s lip movements. “Have you deleted me?”

“Sister, I miss you. Do you miss me too? Can you click the video and let me see you?” a similarly synthetic voice said in another video of Jin. The dubbed voice asks people to use a function similar to Duet on TikTok, which lets additional users join in by adding a side-by-side video of themselves appearing to interact with the original.

02:36

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Elderly Chinese people find social media fame by recreating classic paintings

This is the thing that makes these apps from Beijing-based ByteDance so engrossing. TikTok and Douyin both learn what users like based on what they interact with and for how long they watch each video.

The more users interact with these kinds of videos featuring Jin, the more often they see similar videos, allowing the operators of these accounts to draw in more viewers, boosting engagement and follower counts. Some fake videos of Jin can draw thousands of likes and comments, with many older female users expressing their love for the star.

Sometimes these videos can be an escape. One 49-year-old woman from a small village in Sichuan province who watched Jin Dong videos on Douyin told the Post that she was in an abusive relationship. The mother of two, who recently moved to Shanghai to find work and declined to give her real name, said her husband had been hitting, scolding and cheating on her for decades.

The woman said many men have pursued her on Douyin, but she only hit it off with Jin. She pulled up his videos every day and called him “little husband”, insisting it was a common endearment. “Other women also call him husband,” she said. “I’m not the only one.”

She would not say whether she believed she was talking with the real Jin Dong, even when asked multiple times, but she eventually lost contact with the account.

“Jin Dong quit Douyin tonight. I don’t why. He is a big star, and I’m only an ordinary person” she told the Post last week.

04:34

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83-year-old Chinese grandfather becomes social media fashion icon

When asked about fake celebrity accounts, ByteDance pointed to a statement the company published online. The company was cracking down on such accounts, the statement said, and Douyin permanently banned 5,000 of them in September alone.

“These counterfeit accounts trick people into following and clicking, and then make a profit from e-commerce and live streaming tips,” Douyin said in the statement. “Some accounts even lead users to other platforms to conduct further financial scams.”

Kuaishou, another hugely popular short video app in China, also said in a statement to the Post that it uncovers these types of accounts through content moderation and user reporting before choosing to ban the accounts either temporarily or permanently. Both Douyin and Kuaishou said that they work with law enforcement on serious cases that involve scams.

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Another side of the problem is that China’s elderly population has been quickly moving online while also being some of the people most susceptible to digital deceit.

A joint study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Tencent in 2018 found that 67.3 per cent of internet users aged 50 and above either had been deceived online or suspected that they had. This included financial scams, misinformation and false advertising.

Online scams are still happening most often within messaging apps, but short video apps like Douyin have become a breeding ground for them thanks to the enticing feed of never-ending tailored content.

There could also be another factor at play: loneliness. Some older people who lack a social life and have unfulfilled emotional needs around the age of 50 or 60 may latch on to online interactions, said Zhansheng Chen, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Hong Kong. Getting special attention from someone online could elicit a strong response in some people, he said.

“This kind of interaction could be very, very strong for them,” Chen said. “[Many of them] may feel like Jin Dong has a connection with them, which is very special for them, and they’re not willing to think about whether other people have similar connections with Jin Dong.”

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As of June, 22.8 per cent of all internet users in China were above the age of 50, according to data from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). That number was just 16.9 per cent in March, and it was 13.6 per cent in June of last year.

Huang in Jiangxi reportedly switched from a feature phone to a smartphone earlier this year. That was when she started spending much of her time on Douyin, from morning to night, barely eating anything, her husband said on the news programme.

06:43

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Promising on paper, but “communal retirement” in China meets challenges in reality

Huang said she had fallen in love with the actor. When her husband tried to tell her that she was not watching the real Jin Dong on Douyin, Huang repeatedly snapped and threw things at him. She also spent a lot of money buying products peddled by the fake account, Huang said, and she travelled alone to another city to look for him.

Like Huang and the woman from Sichuan, many have been drawn in by similar videos. In June, a woman in her 80s who lives alone also developed a crush on Jin Dong through Douyin videos, according to a report in the state-backed media outlet Beijing Youth Daily.

She flew overnight from Shanghai to Beijing to pursue the star, believing the actual actor followed her on the app and was interacting with her in the comment sections, according to the report.

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The comments on these fake videos are full of people professing their love for the star. And sometimes they also express scepticism.

“Who doesn’t want you. So many pretty women are with you every day,” reads one comment. “Sister has spent a lot of money looking for you. What happened. Brother, I don’t know what the truth is. Can you tell me?”

While recommendation algorithms do play a part in making these fake videos so prevalent, the scams are not the fault of platforms, said Fang Kecheng, an assistant professor of journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who studies how platforms and algorithms influence information environments. The problem is really scammers exploiting the algorithms to create videos that appeal to older female users, he said.

“The platform did not match them on purpose, but algorithms did play the part of helping the scammers find their victims,” Fang said.

Platforms do use technology to try to detect fake videos, but human labour is still needed to accurately root out these scams, according to Dong Jing, an associate professor at the Institution of Automation at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

But platforms may not be motivated to invest a significant amount of resources in removing such videos because they are not as heavily regulated as pornographic or violent content, she said.

“I think this is a societal problem,” Dong said of women falling for fake celebrity videos. “And it’s quite difficult to solve a societal problem solely with technology.”

According to a 2018 report from the Ministry of Public Security, state-run media outlet People’s Daily and Tencent, 30 per cent of older internet users were spending more than three hours online per day, with nearly 10 per cent spending six hours online each day.

But some people think that it does not hurt to let older people spend more time online if it helps them feel less lonely.

“I had long lost the will to live,” the Sichuanese woman said. “Thanks to the Douyin platform, I feel happy again.”