‘Traumatised’ China rural woman who uses sob story to gain sympathy online exposed as fraud
Woman claims mentally ill foster mother raised her after she was abandoned as young child
A Chinese influencer with more than one million followers faked her backstory and claimed she was raised by a foster mother with severe mental illness, eventually resulting in police detention.
The woman, surnamed Xiao, used her account on Kuaishou – a TikTok-like platform – to tell her audience that she was 18 years old and living in a village in Liaoning in northeast China.
She said her biological parents abandoned her as a child, and her foster mother saw her on the street and took her in. Xiao said that her foster mother’s biological daughter had died in a fire many years ago.
Xiao said that the fire traumatised her foster mother and caused severe trauma, which was exacerbated when her supposed foster father abandoned the two women because of mental health issues.
She said she had been living with her foster mother and her grandmother until the beginning of this year when the grandmother passed away.
This sad tale earned much sympathy online, and Xiao had accumulated 1.13 million followers on Kuaishou as a result.