- Plan backfires when ‘fidelity agent’ becomes abusive after being rejected by woman he was supposed to be investigating
- Police move in after reading woman’s social media post saying she was being trolled by an ‘internet cop’
A man's desire to test his girlfriend's fidelity ended in disaster last week, and left one man in custody, according to a police report.
The incident, in Zhengzhou, capital of central China's Hunan province, started when the boyfriend " a 22-year-old surnamed Fu " employed the services of an online "fidelity agent", surnamed Yang.
Concerned that his girlfriend " a 22-year-old named Song " might be unfaithful to him, Fu gave personal information about her to Yang and asked him to test the waters.
The agent then contacted Song via WeChat " China's most popular messaging app " and tried to befriend her.
After chatting for a while, Yang asked Song to be his girlfriend. When she refused, rather than reporting his findings back to Fu, Yang took offence and began insulting the young woman.
Upset by his onslaught, Song began to question Yang about how he had found her in the first place. When she asked how he had got hold of her phone number, address and even the number on her ID card Yang claimed he was an "internet police officer" and had access to a range of information about her and her family.
Song then decided to go public and posted screenshots of her conversations with Yang on Weibo, China's Twitter-like platform.
According to various online news reports, Yang wrote in one message that "all the information on your family members is maintained by me. Not only about you, but also everyone in this city."
When Yang saw that Song had republished his comments, he explained that he had been hired to investigate her and asked her to delete the post. She refused.
Police detain 100 over US$7 million 'fortune-telling' scam
In the meantime, police in Zhengzhou had seen Yang's claim to be an internet police officer and launched their own investigation.
While the police report did not go into detail, it said that all three parties had been charged with "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" " a catch-all term used by the authorities to cover a range of unspecified offences " and that Yang had been detained.
Social media users delivered a mixed verdict on the incident, though several questioned why Song had been punished.
"The woman was the victim from the beginning," one Weibo user said.
Others poked fun at the whole episode.
"These three are going about it all wrong," one said. "Fidelity test? What do you expect to find?"
Copyright (c) 2019. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.