Court upholds sentence for con man

Shanghai No.1 Intermediate People's Court has upheld a 12-year prison sentence for a 28-year-old man who swindled more than 1.33 million yuan ($218,218) from six women he dated, the court said Wednesday.

In his initial trial, the defendant, surnamed Jiang, was convicted of fraud for lying about his identity so he could trick the women into lending him money, according to a court press release.

Jiang appealed the original sentence on the grounds that the prosecution miscalculated how much money he swindled. Because he was accused of stealing more than 200,000 yuan, Jiang faced a minimum 10-year prison sentence.

Despite Jiang's arguments to the contrary, the intermediate court found there was sufficient evidence, including bank statements and text messages, to show that the calculation was correct.

Jiang ran the scam from 2007 to 2011, usually posing as a rich, successful man.

He used the promise of marriage to persuade his victims to lend him money under false pretexts.

One victim, surnamed Wan, met Jiang online in February 2009 while he was pretending to be a company president. He told Wan that his surname was Lin and he had French citizenship.

Soon after they started dating, Jiang started asking Wan to lend him money under the pretext that his business had cash flow problems and he needed to pay employee salaries and make investments. Wan gave him 910,000 yuan in total from February 2009 to April 2010.

Because she thought she would eventually marry Jiang, Wan lent him the funds without question, even though it forced her to borrow money from her mother and sell her apartment. Then, in February 2011, she discovered by chance that Lin wasn't his real name. Jiang vanished soon after.

He scammed another woman, surnamed Yu, by pretending to be a pilot for China Eastern Airlines.

The two met online in June 2010. After they started dating the following February, Jiang once again started asking to borrow money.

In one instance, he said he needed it to purchase an apartment. In another, he said he wanted to buy a car. Yu gave him more than 100,000 yuan in total during their relationship.

Police caught Jiang in March 2012 when he showed up to a police station to deal with an unrelated financial dispute. He was wanted at the time, so the officers there recognized him and took him into custody.