Marketer arrested for scamming online shop owner

An online marketer has been arrested for taking 200,000 yuan ($33,050) from an online shop owner after making false claims that he could give her business a boost, prosecutors said Sunday.

The owner, surnamed Zhou, a Songjiang district resident, ran across the suspect, surnamed Duan, online in April while she was looking for someone to help promote her shop, according to a press release from the Songjiang District Prosecutor's Office.

Zhou had opened an accessories store on taobao.com at the beginning of the year, but business was slow and competition was fierce. Duan said that he was good at online marketing, so she hired him to boost sales.

After two months, her business hadn't picked up as much as Duan promised, so he came up with an idea to extract more money from Zhou, prosecutors said. He suggested she seek help from another Internet marketer who he called Qin. When Zhou contacted Qin, he told her that he had connections that could get her shop into a big sale that Taobao hosted in September.

Participating in the sale would be a boon to Zhou's business, so she was eager to work with Qin. She didn't know that Qin was actually Duan using a new account.

Posing as Qin, Duan asked Zhou to hand over a 200,000-yuan deposit because her shop wasn't large enough to participate in the sale under Taobao's rules. Duan told her that he needed the money to "make things happen," prosecutors said.

Zhou transferred the money to the fictional marketer's bank account, but she did not get accepted for the sale in September. When she asked why, she was told that too many other shops had also wanted to join. Zhou reported the case to police on November 16. Police arrested Zhou in Henan province about 10 days later.

Duan confessed to scamming Zhou and told police that he had already spent most of the money on his own business.