Your in-game girlfriend might be a dude, even if you've video-chatted with her

Xia, a male gamer in China, felt like things were going well. In his favorite game he had met a girl, and after some spicy in-game chatting, the two became boyfriend and girlfriend. He’d never met her in person, but the two had even video-chatted a few times. Imagine his surprise and dismay, then, when a month into their “relationship” he discovered she was flirting with someone else in the game.

This second object of her affections, surnamed Hu, refused to back down when Xia approached him in-game and asked him to bow out. Ultimately, players in the game who were following the conflict gave them a suggestion: Xia and Hu should meet up in real life and fight it out. That’s why on Saturday evening, Xia went into a Hudao internet cafe where Hu was playing the game, dragged him out into the street, and smashed a beer bottle over his head before fleeing into the night.

The police were called, of course, and Xia was apprehended while Hu was taken to a clinic for stitches. And while Xia is still in custody and charged with causing intentional physical harm, that’s not the only bad news he got from police. His “girlfriend”, they said, was in all likelihood a man.

Xia in police custody.

It’s actually a common scam in China, and it’s something all gamers (even those outside the Middle Kingdom) should be aware of. Here’s how it works. The (usually male) scammer meets the “mark” in-game and pretends that he is a girl. There’s some flirty text-chatting, and but when it comes time for video chats (there will only be a few) he gets an attractive female friend to stand in and pretend to be the girl the mark has been talking to in the game. Once the mark is convinced the in-game player is really a girl, they enter into a “relationship”.

This “relationship” can mean a lot of the mark — as evidenced by Xia’s violent behavior — but to the scammer, it’s just a way of getting in-game items. Gifts from “her” boyfriend can be sold for real money without her having to put any effort into earning them. And if “she” is able to keep multiple “boyfriends” at a time, perhaps in the same game or across several different games, then the scammer can have a pretty steady flow of in-game items coming in as gifts, which can then be sold for cold hard cash.

This should be obvious and hopefully something all of our readers were already aware of, but just in case: be very careful getting involved in any kind of in-game romantic relationship. These relationships are becoming more common as more of the world gets into MMOs and other multiplayer games, but keep in mind that it’s pretty easy to trick people when for most of the relationship you can hide behind a keyboard.

(Note: for the curious, the image I’ve used here is of sirens, the creatures from Greek mythology that appeared as beautiful women and lured sailors to their doom.)

(via QQ Games)