There have been a raft of high-profile scams in China of late, most recently the "straddling bus" supposedly capable of gliding over traffic jams which has been revealed as a suspected Ponzi scheme, but the latest swindle out of Guangdong province is of truly imperial standing.
Masquerading as a Qing dynasty emperor who died over 200 years ago to swindle an elderly woman in southern China out of 40 million yuan, nearly €5.5 million, is a new level of con artistry.
The hoax took place about four years ago, with one of the two swindlers, Wan Jianmin, presenting himself to a wealthy woman, Zheng Xueju, as a Vietnam War veteran – China also fought, and lost, a war with Vietnam in 1979 – who had previously been commissioner of Jiangxi province.
He professed to manage a 300 million yuan (€40 million) investment fund and claimed to have great connections in the Communist Party. However, what really impressed Ms Zheng was the fact that he personally knew Qianlong, the most famous of all the emperors in China who ruled from 1735 to 1796.
Qianlong is revered in China for his military prowess against the Turks and the Mongols, and for his lengthy six-decade reign. He is best known in the West for receiving an enormous British trade delegation led by the Antrim-born, Trinity College Dublin graduate George Macartney, although some mystery remains over whether or not the Irish peer kowtowed to Qianlong when presenting his credentials.
Elixir of life
Mr Wan introduced Ms Zheng to his accomplice Liu Qianzhen, who claimed that he was indeed the storied leader and that he was still alive because he drank the elixir of life, a potion that many of China’s past emperors spent huge amounts of time and resources trying to track down.
Not only was Qianlong still alive, he also still had all the riches of the Qing dynasty, which ended in 1911. In language that sounds eerily familiar to that used in email scams, Mr Wan said he would be able to “unfreeze” the royal funds.
In 2014 she gave them 10 million yuan (€1.33 million) towards an investment opportunity involving the purchase of jade cabbage sculptures – one of the centrepieces of Jianlong’s formidable art collection is a jade cabbage sculpture, which is still on display at the Imperial Palace museum in Taipei, brought there by fleeing nationalists after the 1949 revolution.
Ms Zheng later transferred another 30 million yuan (€3.99 million) of her husband’s money to the two conmen towards a start-up in Shenzhen.
The two were caught after splashing the cash on apartments, cars and medicines, and have been convicted of fraud and impersonation by a Shenzhen court, they are awaiting sentencing.
Elevated bus
Meanwhile, although it looked like the future: a wide, elevated bus that would speed atop tracks straddling Chinese roads while multiple lanes of traffic flowed below, the Transit Elevated Bus (TEB) has been consigned to the annals of ignominy.
Just as international excitement began to build following a test of the prototype in August, the TEB story went off the rails. According to China’s state media organs, previously big boosters of the project, the TEB was little more than a publicity stunt – one of the dozens of peer-to-peer lending scams that have duped retail Chinese investors in recent years by promising unreal annual returns.
– (Additional reporting: Bloomberg)
