He had been using the money from the women to pay his debts.
In an incident that seems straight out of a movie, three women in China teamed up to expose a man who posed as a love interest and cheated them of 100,000 yuan (Rs 11,67,982), South China Morning Post reported. As a result of the police investigation, the Shanghai man has received two years and six months in jail.
It all started when the three women went to a police station in Shanghai's Yangpu District on February 10 to report He Shiwei of deceiving them. The women claimed that Shiwei borrowed money from them, but never returned it.
One of the women, Chen Hong, said that she began to get suspicious of Shiwei and checked his phone after he fell asleep drunk. She found multiple messages from another woman asking him why he was rejecting her calls. Chen then contacted a woman named Xiao Fan and found out that she lived with Shiwei, who usually came to her flat to sleep every night.
Chen and Xiao found that Shiwei had told both of them he wanted to marry them.
That was not it. On February 10, Chen got a call from a third woman, named Zhao Lin, saying she was also Shiwei's girlfriend. When he got up, Chen confronted him and demanded he return the money he took from her. Upon his refusal, all three women reached the police station to file a complaint.
It was evident that they had been sharing the same boyfriend. He had been dating Chen since October 2022, Xiao since June 2022 and Zhao since 2021.
The police found that Shiwei had quit his job in 2020 and was unemployed since then. He had been using the money from the women to pay his debts.
Meanwhile, the three women who became good friends during the course of the investigation, went on an overseas trip together after the man was imprisoned. When a police officer called them with an update on the case in March, he got to know that the women were on holiday abroad together.
''We got along well during the trip. We were discussing a question every day such as – what virtue or ability did he have to enthrall all of us? This scenario was so fun. All three of us are pure and good-hearted. It shows that He is good at judging people, so he managed to cheat money from us,'' Chen told SCMP.