Daughter ‘defrauded’ web donors after blasts
Print Edition
A woman who allegedly cheated online donors of nearly 100,000 yuan (US$15,210) by pretending to lose her father in the Tianjin blasts stood trial for fraud yesterday in south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
Yang Cailan, 20, from Fangchenggang City in Guangxi, was accused of collecting 96,576.44 yuan from 3,739 Weibo users through the tipping function on the social networking website by claiming that her father was killed in the warehouse explosions in Tianjin City, north China, on August 12.
At 1am on August 13, Yang wrote: “My father works near the blast site. I’m so scared. His mobile phone is turned off. She updated her post two hours later: “I still can’t contact him. It reminds me of the night when my mother died.”
At 10pm on August 13, she published her last post, which said she had finally found her father at a hospital but he was dying. This post attracted widespread attention and within two hours, she received nearly 100,000 yuan from sympathetic netizens, prosecutors said.
Yang initially told the court she just wanted to vent her frustration after quarrelling with her father. But after she learnt about Weibo’s tipping function, she became greedy and decided to lie about her father’s death.
Her lies were exposed by a subsequent “human flesh search.” But instead of confessing to police, she told officers at the time that her Weibo account was accessed by someone without her permission and asked them to help her return the donations, prosecutors said.
Yang told the court: “I didn’t know what to do. I don’t want other people’s money.” All the donations have been returned.
Prosecutors asked the court to sentence Yang to between three and three and a half years in prison. Citing her decision to “surrender to police,” her lawyer asked the court for lenience.
The Fangcheng District People’s Court has not yet delivered its verdict.
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