Investment scammer sentenced to five years in prison

A local court has sentenced a man to five years in prison for bilking a woman out of more than 200,000 yuan ($32,089) with a phony gold investment scheme, Jing'an District People's Court said Monday.

The 32-year-old defendant, who was not identified, was found guilty of fraud, according to a press release from the court.

The man started the scheme by setting up a Hong Kong-registered company on the Internet in 2009 with someone else's State identification card, the press release said. To convince people that his company was legitimate, he rented an office on Nanjing Road for three months. He also spent 200 yuan to buy a bank account registered in someone else's name. He used the account to accept money transfers from his victims.

A woman surnamed Xu transferred more than 200,000 yuan to the account with the belief that the defendant would invest the money on her behalf. To make his scheme more convincing, the man sent his wife to Xu's house to install software on her computer that spat out phony data about her supposed investment, according to the court.

In March 2011, Xu learned that she had lost 80,000 yuan in the investment. When she found out she could not withdrawal the remainder of her money or contact the defendant, she called the police.

The defendant later confessed that he deposited the money in his wife's account and used it to buy stocks and cars, according to the court. After losing the money in the stock market, he and his wife changed their phone numbers. Police caught them on a train to Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, in April and officially arrested them in May.

The court sentenced the defendant's wife to two years in prison for being an accomplice, but suspended the sentence.