Here is a story that leaves you not knowing whether to laugh or cry.
Late on the night of September 8, around 10 p.m., a terrified father named Lao Xie rushed into the Datian Police Station in Dongfang, Hainan. He told officers that his son had been kidnapped abroad and dragged into a scam compound. The alleged captors were demanding a 20,000 yuan ransom and warned that things would get ugly if the family didn't pay up. The old man was beside himself, genuinely believing his son had fallen into the hands of those infamous overseas syndicates.
Police calmed him down and immediately launched an investigation. By September 16, they finally tracked the son down—living inside a rented apartment in Haikou city, right there in Hainan.
It turns out the young man had never set foot outside China. He was simply dead broke and desperate for cash. While scrolling through short videos online, he kept seeing stories about scam compounds extorting families back home. That gave him a twisted idea. He decided to fake his own kidnapping, staged fake photos showing himself looking beaten up, and sent them to his father on WeChat to demand 20,000 yuan.
Once picked up by the police, he confessed to the whole fake-kidnapping scheme and was put under administrative detention.
Sitting at a roadside tea stall around here, listening to the roar of motorbikes and hearing people talk about the grim reality of scam compounds, you know how terrifying these stories are for families with relatives working overseas. To see someone back home turn that exact nightmare into a cheap scam against his own father—you really do not even know what to say.
