A wife who swindled huge sums, faked giving birth to a child and plotted to kill her husband in a car crash before fleeing to the United States: it is not the plot of a thriller but the real-life struggle of a 52-year-old Chinese investor, Li Ping.
Over nine years and at a cost of about 13 million yuan ($1.9 million), he finally brought his fraudster former wife to face the law. A 15-minute video Li Ping recently shared on social media has stirred fierce discussion across China.
According to the South China Morning Post, Li Ping earned about 70 million yuan ($10 million) investing in the stock market between 1996 and 2014. In 2014, he met a bank officer named Zhang Shudan at a business forum.
Zhang presented herself to Li as a fighter who had risen from a very poor family. Li claims she deliberately entered his life mainly because she saw his wealth.
Drawn to Zhang, Li deposited 20 million yuan in her bank and began giving her large sums from time to time in the name of medical treatment for her foster parents. In early 2015 Zhang expressed a wish to marry, and in March said she was pregnant. Overjoyed, Li bought her a 7.5 million yuan luxury apartment in Shenzhen, and they married that April.
But the very day after the wedding came the first mysterious incident: as Li was driving back to Shenzhen, his car’s brakes suddenly failed, causing a serious accident that he narrowly survived.
A few days later, on the pretext of making the bank’s performance look good, Zhang took about 2.7 million yuan from her husband. Soon after, she disappeared with all her documents and the ownership deeds of four properties Li had bought.
A police investigation later found that Zhang had fled to Los Angeles via Hong Kong.
Further investigation turned up even more startling information: police found that Zhang and an accomplice were behind the brake failure the day after the wedding. “If she had only stolen money, I might not have pursued her so hard,” Li said. “But she plotted to kill me, so that as my wife she could inherit all my property.”
Li announced a $1 million reward to find his fraudster wife, hiring private detectives and lawyers in both China and the United States. Churches, Chinese community centres and maternity centres in the US were searched. After a nine-year hunt costing about 13 million yuan, Zhang and her child were traced in Los Angeles, and a DNA test proved the child was not Li’s.
The legal battle did not begin easily. Because Zhang was still Li’s legal wife, the fraud case initially stalled; but in 2020 a Shenzhen court annulled their marriage and ordered the four properties returned to Li’s name.
Finally, in 2024, a California court convicted Zhang Shudan of 23 offences — including fraud, illegal entry, visa fraud, child abduction and human trafficking — and sentenced her to 65 years in prison. Li Ping said legal action had also been taken in China against the accomplices who helped Zhang flee the country.
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