By any measure, Wang Fei has had a nightmarish eight months. The former Beijing advertising company employee has been tried and convicted online for his wife's suicide, has lost his job, his parents' home has been besieged by vigilantes and he has had death threats.
Mr Wang's descent into virtual and real-life torment has been propelled by his appearance on a mainland entertainment website search engine known as Renrou, which literally means human flesh. Renrou is a kind of information collection service and Mr Wang is just one of several people it has plucked from obscurity and placed at the mercy of an online mob.
He is trying to seek legal redress against the website that initiated the netizens' hunting campaign but, after three court hearings, he is yet to get satisfaction.
Mr Wang's private world became public late last year when Net users latched on to the 'death diary' of his late wife Jiang Yan .
Jiang, then 31, jumped from the 24th floor of a Beijing building in December, but not before chronicling her plans to kill herself in a blog over three months. The woman was apparently heartbroken about her husband's alleged affair with a 23-year-old colleague.
Jiang's diary was quickly picked up by Net users who, in turn, used Renrou to bring personal information about Mr Wang, his alleged mistress and his family to the surface.