Chinese woman discovers Romeo con man who cheated her of 600,000 yuan is son-in-law

A woman in eastern China was swindled out of hundreds of thousands of yuan by a man online who turned out to be her son-in-law, Chinese media reported.

And the reason she found out was that her daughter – the culprit’s wife who was unaware of the deceit – was shown the emails and thought “hmm, that sounds familiar”.

The mother, from Yangzhou in Jiangsu province, was courted by a man she met on the web, who used a variety of excuses to trick her into wiring him more than 600,000 yuan (US$86,900) over a period of nine months, the Yangtse Evening Post reported.

The victim, whose name was not reported, believed the man to be a 56-year-old entrepreneur from Guangzhou called Zhou Cheng.

He was in fact her son-in-law, who later confessed to setting out to cheat his relative.

He has been arrested and is awaiting prosecution, the paper reported.