‘Virtual girlfriends’ like Mango Girl at the heart of a WeChat scam
- Police arrest 28 people – mostly men – accused of creating fake profiles on the social network to dupe other men into sending money
- Shanghai man says he transferred nearly US$2,000 in ‘birthday gifts’
“Mango Girl” was an attractive young woman who had volunteered as a kindergarten teacher in a remote village on tropical Hainan Island.
And when a 29-year-old white-collar worker in Shanghai got a message from her on WeChat one night in December, asking him to add her as a contact, he didn’t think twice.
That’s according to a report in Thepaper.cn on Tuesday. It said the man, whose name was not given, told police he soon became smitten with the pretty, kind-hearted woman he was chatting to on the popular Chinese social network.
Only she wasn’t a young woman at all – she was one of a number of fake profiles created using stolen photos and details from characters in web novels, according to police in the city’s Pudong New Area.
The gang behind the scam used the profiles to convince men to hand over more than 500,000 yuan (US$73,800) in just three months, from October to December, the report said, citing police.