Con woman faces charges after faking weddings with different men for money

A con woman in China is facing up to 10 years in prison after scamming three men out of $92,000 (over P5 million) by staging fake weddings and hiring actors to pretend to be her relatives.

According to the South China Morning Post, the woman called Zhou was lawfully married and had a daughter before starting to date other men.

She was able to hide her relationships from her then-legal husband by meeting her three potential lovers—surnamed Luo, Zhang, and Xu—at work or online.

The 35-year-old woman gave them a fake name and lured them for over a few months with her charm and affection, before asking them to marry her.

"To avoid officially registering the marriages, she lied about her house being demolished and needing to stay single to receive government compensation. However, she suggested having a wedding ceremony to collect the gifts and money," SMCP reported.

Zhang Xueting, the assistant prosecutor at the Nanjing Lishui People’s Procuratorate, told Jiangsu Television that Zhou is "good-looking and good at pretending."

The local media outlet also said that this was not the first time Zhou got involved in a romance scam. Last year, she swindled money from Zhang and told him she was going to give birth to his twins—a boy and a girl. When the man carried out a background check on Zhou, he learned she was legally married and reported her to authorities.

The local procuratorate then filed a criminal charge against Zhou, who is now facing a minimum of 10 years in prison for fraud.

Zhou’s legal husband divorced her earlier this year.