Chinese woman arranges $65,000 blind date by hiring actors to portray herself and family

A married Chinese woman has been arrested after hiring actors to impersonate her parents and herself in an elaborate scheme to trick her on a blind date.

Police told Chinese media outlet Jimu News that a man surnamed Xin from central China’s Hubei province had met a woman identified as Xiaoyu. She saw his contact information in a wedding planning ad and contacted him in August 2022.

Xiaoyu, originally from the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu, confessed her love to Xin just a month after their first online meeting. When they began planning their marriage last year, she told Xin that he must pay her family a bride price of 188,000 yuan ($26,000) in accordance with local customs.

Last January, Xin brought home gifts worth 10,000 yuan to meet her parents, but she said she was sick and did not come.

Over the next year, she repeatedly demanded money from him for her mother’s surgery and gifts for her sister, consistently turning down his requests to meet, citing that it was “inconvenient”.

To keep up the illusion, she sent him pictures and talked to him on the phone, which helped calm his growing suspicions. Xin reported that he had transferred more than 220,000 yuan to Xiaoyu in the past year.