Chinese woman swindles consultants to arrange luxury revenge wedding
Events were booked at exotic locations. Planners were flown by business jet to a tropical island. But she had no money – just a burning compulsion to get even with her ex-husband
A woman has been arrested for fraud in southwest China after she swindled a firm into planning a luxury wedding for her in an attempt to spite her ex-husband.
The woman, identified only by a pseudonym Yang Mei, had contacted a wedding consultant in Chengdu, Sichuan province, in September, saying she wanted to hold three luxury weddings at resorts in Thailand’s Ko Samui, Sanya in Hainan, and Macau, the West China City Daily reported.
Her budget for each event was 3 million yuan (HK$3.35 million), she told the wedding planners, according to the report.
She booked a private jet and took three wedding consultants to Ko Samui to inspect the venue. During the four-day trip, Yang invited the wedding planners to stay with her in a villa with an ocean view.
Yang told the consultants that she was doing all that to ensure she could have a dream wedding with her fiancé, whom she described as “a rich guy who had been going after her for a long time”, the report said.
The fiancé never showed up, though.
The wedding consultants and jet rental firm realised Yang’s scam only after she disappeared leaving them with a long, unpaid bill, including 760,000 yuan for the chartered plane and 100,000 yuan for the stay in Ko Samui.
After she was tracked down and detained by authorities in a hotel in Chengdu this month, Yang told police that there was in fact no rich fiancé – the man in the photos she showed off was merely a wealthy schoolmate of hers.
She confessed that she had wanted to plan a luxury wedding to spite her ex-husband after “he began to show his happiness [with his new wife] soon [after their divorce]”, the report said.
Yang said she had talked to the wedding consultants a year ago when she was getting married, so she made up a story but did not expect such a small consultancy to take up her case.
“But they did, and I felt so embarrassed and awkward and couldn’t find a way out,” she said.
To convince the organisers, she even forged contracts and other documents, the report said.
Yang has since been formally arrested for contract fraud.
