Is a high-profile critic of the Chinese Communist Party a con man?

AMSTERDAM — It seemed like a simple plan.

Liu Fengling and her two children were living in a small township in central China, and in the spring of 2023, they began applying for visas to the Netherlands. They hoped to reunite with their husband and father, Gao Zhi, a Chinese dissident, who had won asylum in the Netherlands several years earlier.

But in June of that year, Chinese police descended on Liu’s house in Henan province. They questioned her, roughed her up and seized her cellphone. Frightened, the family fled to Thailand, where they hoped to get Dutch visas.

Then, their dream of an easy escape to Europe collapsed.

After arriving in Thailand, Liu got a call from a man who said he was a Chinese diplomat. He told her that Chinese authorities believed her son had threatened to blow up the Chinese Embassy in Bangkok.

“Don’t try to cover up for your son!” the man warned, according to a recording the family shared with NPR. “If we call the police and he is arrested, he will be quite severely punished.”

“I’m not covering up for him!” Liu protested.

The news grew worse.

Staying in a Bangkok hotel while waiting for a visa appointment, Liu received an email that appeared to come from the Dutch immigration service. It said airports in Europe had received bomb threats claiming to be from her and her son.

“Therefore [your] travel to the EU is legally restricted,” the email read.

Liu and her two children were shocked and scared. Nothing had prepared them for this or the dizzying intrigue that lay ahead.

Liu, now 43, worked on the cleaning staff of a hotel. Her son, Peng, 20, was unemployed, and her daughter, Han, 17, was still in school. The trip to Bangkok was the family’s first outside China. Now, it seemed, they were on a no-fly list.

Amid the confusion, Liu and her daughter overstayed their Thai tourist visas. A court sentenced them to two months in immigration detention. Peng also overstayed his visa, but police didn't pursue him.

Mother and daughter were now locked up, but the drumbeat of bewildering news continued.

Back at his home in the Dutch countryside, Gao received another alarming message from the same Dutch immigration email account. It said his wife and daughter had confessed to making additional bomb threats against EU embassies in Thailand.

“They apologized for this and volunteered to return to China,” the email read.

Gao couldn’t believe it. His wife and kids weren’t even political. Gao suspected the Chinese Communist Party must be behind the bomb threats, but still, he was puzzled.

“I really can’t understand the motive,” Gao told NPR at the time. “It’s too big a waste of resources. I’m obscure, like a nobody!”

Gao was not that well-known among dissidents, but his housemate, Wang Jingyu, was.

Wang, 22, is a high-profile Chinese dissident with tens of thousands of followers on X who constantly criticizes the Communist Party. He has been featured on TV news shows from Berlin to Tokyo. As the family’s crisis unfolded in Thailand, Gao relied on Wang for advice, translation and managing the media.

Wang was familiar with what the Gao family was going through. In 2022, someone used Wang’s name to make bomb threats against hotels and Chinese embassies in Western Europe, according to police. Wang said he did nothing wrong and insisted that the Chinese government had set him up.

This practice is a form of “swatting.” That’s when someone reports a fake crime that tricks police into targeting an innocent person.

Gao thought his relationship with Wang might explain why his family had been singled out. Someone claiming to be a Communist Party agent had written to Gao and urged him to stop Wang from accepting interviews with reporters.

But Wang kept talking. Gao thought the bomb threat allegations against his family could be payback.

"I think the Chinese government is treating us so badly to show its power," Gao told NPR. "No matter whether you are at home or abroad, you cannot escape its power."

The bomb threats appeared to be just the latest example of the Chinese Communist Party flexing its muscles overseas, targeting and terrorizing its critics and even their family members. China’s campaign of repression overseas is the world’s most sophisticated, comprehensive and far-reaching, according to Freedom House, a human rights and democracy think tank in Washington.

NPR spent months investigating the bomb threat allegations and the Gao family members’ incarceration in Thailand. Reporters pored over more than 700 emails, messages and videos in Chinese, English, Dutch and Thai. They conducted dozens of hours of interviews with people in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the United States.

But what the reporters found is not at all what they expected.

Instead, they found a story about how the fear that the Communist Party generates can spread like a virus among its critics overseas, breeding confusion, distrust and paranoia — and how that fear can be weaponized by almost anyone and lead to catastrophe.

Gao Zhi, 44, is a small, wiry, working-class man with a goatee. He grew up during China's economic boom years in a small village in the Yellow River Valley. Like tens of millions of other rural Chinese men, he moved from job to job — working in a factory, as a waiter, a truck driver and a security guard.

Gao wasn’t political growing up, but he learned how to jump over China’s Great Firewall. That’s the sophisticated filtering system that blocks access to sensitive foreign websites to keep Chinese people in the dark. In 2019, Gao read about the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. He says he was outraged and vented online.

“I started cursing the Communist Party, saying that the Communist Party should be annihilated,” recalled Gao, who was working at the time at a factory to the west of Shanghai that made motherboards.

Gao tried to talk to fellow workers about the protests, but they sided with the Chinese government. Disappointed and disillusioned, Gao boarded a flight to the Netherlands in 2020, and he entered on a tourist visa.

A few days after Gao arrived, his father back in China told him that police had come asking questions. Gao says his father urged his son to return and said he might have to do some prison time.

“At this point I thought, ‘Wow! It’s this serious!’” Gao said. “No way I can go back."

The Dutch government granted Gao asylum. His wife and two then-teenage children remained in China.

Gao settled into a government-assigned house in a village in the Dutch countryside. Gao speaks only Chinese and nobody else in the village does, so it was a lonely existence.

“I didn’t know things would turn out like this,” said Gao. “I often feel empty inside.”

Gao had no job and survived on government assistance. He spent his time studying Dutch, riding his bike around the countryside and posting online, protesting the Chinese regime, which was now thousands of miles away.

At the end of 2022, Gao met Wang Jingyu when he joined a candlelight protest that Wang had organized in The Hague. People came to mourn the loss of 10 people who had died in an apartment-building fire in northwestern China after government COVID-19 restrictions had led to blocked entrances and sealed doors.

Afterward, as Gao waited for a train home, Wang approached.

Gao already knew about Wang, who is a sort of celebrity dissident and social media influencer. In just the previous few weeks, Dutch, German, Japanese and Slovak media had all interviewed him about his claims of Chinese government harassment.

The two men — nearly a generation apart — talked for hours. Gao was impressed.

“Such a young person with such a clear-eyed and resolute resistance — I think it's very valuable,” said Gao, “especially that he’s in the same country as me.”

Wang’s origin story is even more harrowing than Gao’s. Wang grew up a middle-class kid, studying at an international school in Chongqing, a megacity in China’s southwest. Wang is tall with straight wispy bangs that cut across his forehead. Clever and personable, he first made news at the precocious age of 19.

Writing online in 2020, Wang challenged China’s official version that none of its troops had died in a border clash with Indian soldiers. Wang was right: China later acknowledged that four of its soldiers had been killed. At the time, Wang told NPR he couldn’t stand that the Chinese government routinely misled its people.

“Since the founding of the Communist Party until now, the Chinese government has always been like this,” said Wang, “fabricating facts and ... [making] Chinese people live in a world full of lies.”

After Wang’s online comments, Chinese police announced that they would pursue him, but Wang was traveling overseas at the time and was beyond their reach. Wang eventually made it to the Netherlands, where — like Gao — he received asylum.

His troubles, though, seemed to be just beginning. In the fall of 2022, Wang posted on X that he was receiving harassing calls and messages.

It was also around this time that Safeguard Defenders, a human rights group, revealed that China had secretly opened scores of police service stations around the world, including 30 in Europe. China said the stations just provided citizen services, such as driver’s license renewals, but even Chinese state media reported some stations pressured criminal suspects to go back to China.

Wang said people working for a Chinese police station in the Netherlands made threatening calls to him, warning that his parents would suffer unless he returned to China.

After someone used Wang’s name to make bomb threats, Dutch police took even more interest. Wang recalls Dutch cops questioning him after they received an anonymous email that said he planned to blow up the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

"I said it's absolutely made by Chinese authorities," Wang recalled telling police. "The police asked me, 'Do you need a lawyer?' I said, 'I don't need a lawyer, because I didn't do anything wrong!'"

Most targets of Chinese government repression are reluctant to speak to reporters, but Wang refused to be intimidated.

“If I accept this, I just will stop talking and the Chinese authorities will think this plan works,” Wang told Australian TV last year, “and they will use this plan to attack other Chinese dissidents.”

While extreme, Wang’s experience seemed to illustrate the Chinese government’s growing reach and brazenness.

Scholars have a name for when governments try to target their critics overseas: transnational repression. Yana Gorokhovskaia, who is research director for strategy and design at Freedom House, the Washington think tank, says the Chinese Communist Party leads the world in this practice.

In April, FBI Director Christopher Wray addressed the growing problem in a speech.

“They’re exporting their repression efforts and human rights abuses — targeting, threatening, harassing those who dare question their legitimacy or authority,” said Wray, “even outside China, including right here in the U.S.”

Through his many interviews and claims, Wang became one of the most public victims of Chinese government repression in Europe. More than 50 news organizations have quoted, mentioned or featured him. Witnesses have also referenced Wang’s story in U.S. congressional testimony.

A few months after Wang and Gao first talked at the train station in 2022, Wang messaged him on WhatsApp. He told Gao that the harassment had become so intense he could no longer stay in his apartment.

Gao lived in a three-story house. The other bedrooms were empty as he waited for his family to come from China. So Gao said that for the time being, he was happy to play host.

Wang made himself comfortable, extending his stay from days to weeks to months. He continued to entertain reporters, even using Gao’s living room for TV interviews.

Around this time, NPR was among the news organizations in touch with Wang. NPR was especially interested in his experience with bomb threats. It seemed like an innovative tactic: trick law enforcement in democratic countries into harassing Chinese dissidents and doing the Communist Party’s dirty work.

So when Gao’s family was accused of making bomb threats while in Thailand, Wang alerted NPR and arranged an interview with Gao. The family’s story was gripping, but there was a problem: There was no way to corroborate Gao’s account.

Thai police and Chinese diplomats wouldn’t discuss the case.

NPR asked for documentation, so Gao sent screenshots of Dutch immigration emails referencing the bomb threats. But Gao didn’t include the sender’s email address and refused to provide it when asked.

As Wang lived with Gao, he routinely sat in on interviews and helped interpret for his friend. When NPR urged Gao to send the email address, Wang jumped in to explain Gao’s reluctance.

“This is personal contact information from the immigration service,” Wang told NPR. “So he needs to get permission first. Otherwise, Dutch authorities will be angry, because they don’t want to talk to journalists.”

NPR contacted the press office for Dutch immigration and sent a screenshot of one of the messages Gao said he'd received from it. At first, Dutch immigration refused to discuss the case, citing privacy laws. When pressed, an official said the agency had "no record" of the email.

Then, she confirmed — the email was a forgery.

The implications were profound.

The Gaos’ story about the Communist Party manufacturing bomb threat allegations against them was based in large part on a fabricated document, which raised a whole new set of questions.

Who was behind the emails? What were their motives?

If the emails were fake, what about the bomb threats against the airports in Europe?

Did they even happen?

NPR called police in Europe about the alleged bomb threats.

The police had never heard of them.

The story was quickly unraveling, but it wasn’t clear whether Gao was trying to trick NPR or whether someone had tricked him.

NPR video-called Gao, who was sitting in his living room on a gray couch against a bare wall. At his side — as usual — sat Wang.

Gao seemed surprised and scared to learn he’d passed along forged government emails. He figured that this might be a crime.

“For real? This document is forged?” Gao said. “I got a lot of emails from this Dutch immigration account. Wouldn’t I be accused of forging the others too?”

Wang, on the other hand, sounded skeptical. He questioned whether the Dutch press officer NPR had interviewed was legitimate.

“Who gave the phone number to you?” Wang said, scoffing. “Could it be an imposter?”

Meanwhile, Gao kept getting messages from that same Dutch immigration account. A few weeks after that exchange with NPR, another email arrived with exciting news: Gao’s wife and daughter had been released from Thai detention.

The Dutch account told him that his wife and daughter would not be able to contact him while in transit, but they were headed to Europe and they could soon be reunited. Gao’s son, Peng, the Dutch account said, would follow later.

Peng had been surviving in Bangkok using his mother's Chinese bank account and small remittances from his father. In preparation for his own passage to Europe, Peng had already handed over credit card details to pay for his flights.

But progress was slow. The Dutch immigration account explained that the bomb threat allegations continued to trail Gao’s wife and daughter as they traveled first to Istanbul and then to Switzerland.

“Liu and Han are currently under criminal investigation by the Swiss Federal Police in Basel,” one email told Gao, who still believed the account was authentic.

Finally, it appeared as if they had cleared their legal hurdles. Another email arrived saying his wife and daughter were on their way to Germany, which borders the Netherlands.

Excited, Gao went shopping for eggs and other food so his wife and daughter would have something to eat when they finally arrived at his home. The next day, Gao got the email he’d been waiting for.

“You need to leave this afternoon,” the Dutch immigration account said. “Officials of the German federal police and the German federal intelligence service will contact you directly.”

Gao took a train for several hours to Essen, a German city. When he got off, he lit a cigarette and waited on the platform to hear from German police on where to meet his family.

Then, a man approached.

“When he stretched out his hand, I thought he was going to ask me for cigarettes,” Gao said. “Instead, he grabbed me and pushed me to the ground. When I had a chance to look up, I saw four or five policemen with guns pointed at me.”

It was the German police, but they weren’t there to take Gao to his family. They were there to take him to jail.

Gao said the police told him a young Chinese man — who was a close associate of Wang — had accused Gao of threatening to kill him. Gao knew the man in passing. His name was Ling Huazhan.

Ling told NPR the same story, complete with a chat record showing threats that he claimed to be from Gao. Gao denied threatening him.

German police declined to speak to NPR. Within days, they released Gao, who boarded a train back to the Netherlands.

Gao couldn’t reach his son or Wang. Given what he’d just been through, he was worried about their safety, so he sent them a video message.

“What happened to you?” said Gao, sounding forlorn and exhausted. “I can't reach anyone. Were you also duped? Have you been arrested? How do I come and save you?”

There was no response.

Wang — who had left Gao’s house weeks earlier — was now ghosting him.

The Dutch immigration account went silent too.

“Maybe they had achieved their goal and didn’t need to contact me anymore,” Gao told NPR. “The con was over,” he said.

Gao returned to his brick house in the small Dutch village.

Wang was long gone by now, but his slippers still sat near the door as if he might return any minute. Wang and his girlfriend, who had also lived there, took off in such a hurry that they also left behind clothing in duffel bags, a Mickey Mouse wallet and seven mobile phone SIM cards.

Isolated and alone, Gao sank into despair.

“I couldn’t get out of bed,” Gao recalled. “I realized that I had been deceived, leading to a catastrophe, a huge disaster for my family.”

The disaster: Gao says his family was tricked out of a total of $17,000 — their life savings plus loans from relatives.

Realizing he’d been wiped out, Gao finally decided to trust NPR. He and his son sent NPR hundreds of email exchanges they’d conducted with that now-infamous Dutch immigration account. The immigration account emails were in Dutch, which the Gaos read with the help of Google Translate.

But the sender’s email was not from an official Dutch government account. It was from an account with Proton Mail, an encrypted email service anyone can use.

The “Dutch immigration” account was fake. But Gao — who didn’t grasp the significance of domain names — hadn’t known that.

The Gaos shared with NPR other emails from fake Thai Airways and fake Royal Thai Police accounts, along with private messages they’d received from people claiming to be Communist Party secret agents.

NPR pored through all the communications. What emerged was a road map to what the Gaos described as an elaborate long con.

As NPR sifted through the emails, it was clear that the fake Dutch immigration account had manipulated and tormented the family. Emails claiming that family members had made bomb threats left them paralyzed with fear.

The account also tricked Gao’s wife and daughter into missing a real visa appointment, paving the way for their detention. Then came another devastating blow: The fake Dutch account lured Gao to Germany and his arrest.

And, of course, there was the money.

The family obtained credit cards, and the son, Peng, handed over their details at the request of the fake Thai Airways account. Mysterious charges began appearing on the Gaos’ credit card bills: $16 for Uber Eats in Amsterdam, $41 for a Big Bus tour in Berlin and $172 to CTrip, China’s largest online travel agency.

The credit card company confirmed the charges to NPR.

The Gaos said they had never used credit cards before but didn’t cancel them, because they thought they needed them to get to Europe.

Looking back at how this all began — with the fake emails about fake bomb threats — Gao Zhi said he realized there was one common thread.

“To put it bluntly, Wang Jingyu has been misleading me,” he said.

But how to be certain?

NPR went back through all those fake Dutch immigration emails looking for evidence. They referred to Wang 13 times, emphasizing his supposed importance and noting he had special status as “a national key protected person in the Netherlands.”

One fake document named a fictitious Dutch official: “F.Langfitt.” This is not a common name, but you can find it in one of the bylines at the top of this story.

The Gaos’ credit card records also referred to Wang. At least one charge went to a PayPal account that includes Wang’s name.

Wang denies the PayPal account is his. He claims it is Gao who owes him money.

Perhaps most conclusive, Wang had twice assured NPR that the Dutch immigration email account was authentic.

“I want to be honest to you,” Wang said in an interview without Gao. “I saw the email address. The end is ind.nl.”

Ind.nl is the real domain name for Dutch immigration.

But, of course, the emails came from a Proton Mail account.

NPR sent some of the fake emails to the real Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Service. It is investigating who impersonated it.

If, as Gao asserted, Wang was behind all this, it’s worth considering why he proved so convincing. One reason people were willing to believe Wang — including NPR for a while — is that his narratives are rooted in reality. The Chinese Communist Party does spy on, threaten and even abduct dissidents abroad.

Wang appeared to exploit that reputation. In his dealings with the Gaos, he routinely blamed the party for everything bad that happened to them.

For instance, when Gao’s wife and daughter called from jail, Wang tried to convince Gao and Peng that it wasn’t really them. Instead, he suggested, they were just video and audio the Chinese government had generated with artificial intelligence.

When the Gao family realized their credit cards were bleeding money, someone claiming to be a Chinese secret agent messaged Gao to take the blame. Wang sent Gao a voice message to commiserate.

“This is so bad!” Wang said. “‘Old Commie’ has so much money and still steals from other people!”

Wang also provided guidance to Gao’s son, Peng, on how to get out of Thailand. When Peng couldn’t get through to Wang one time, Wang suggested a Communist agent was disrupting their calls, according to messages provided by the family.

The idea terrified Peng. He said he was afraid to leave his hotel room in Thailand, because he thought a Chinese agent might try to poison him.

In fairness, the Chinese Communist Party is not known for assassinating people overseas. But the family had been bombarded by so many threats that they no longer knew what was real or fake. The Gaos said they continued to believe Wang, in part, because many reporters did.

“Newspapers published a lot of interviews with him,” said Gao. “We trust the mainstream media, so we trusted him. With all his media clips, it was very easy for Wang to trick us.” 

It also seemed that Wang tried to manipulate NPR. As NPR struggled to verify the bomb threats attributed to the Gao family, Wang warned that another news organization was about to break the story. No journalist wants to get beat, but NPR hadn’t completed its reporting.

Then, in July 2023, The Associated Press published the Thai bomb threat story involving the Gaos. The AP treated the fake Dutch immigration emails as authentic. It said the bomb threats appeared to be “part of Beijing's increasingly sophisticated efforts to harass Chinese dissidents living overseas and their families.”

On X, Wang touted the AP story to his then-nearly 42,000 followers. He focused less on the Gaos’ suffering and more on himself.

“AP reported that CCP used other dissidents to Stop me exposing Chinese Overseas Police,” Wang wrote.

The story was republished by the Toronto Star, The Washington Times and one of Japan’s top newspapers, Asahi Shimbun.

NPR reached out and told the AP about the forged emails.

Last month, the AP retracted the story, citing the emails and stating, “there is uncertainty about any Chinese involvement.”

Beyond Thailand, human rights advocates have raised questions about Wang’s earlier claims in Europe.

In September 2022, Safeguard Defenders, the human rights group, published phone numbers connected to the Chinese overseas police stations. A month later, Wang said he’d received harassing calls from one of them in the Dutch city of Rotterdam.

Laura Harth, Safeguard Defenders’ campaign director, says she has had doubts about Wang for years and remains skeptical.

“Up to today,” she said, “he is the only person in the world that claims to have been contacted by one of those very specific numbers.”

Dutch broadcaster RTL Nieuws was the first to report on Chinese police stations in the Netherlands and Wang’s claims that one had contacted him. Investigative reporter Roland Strijker says he sent the police station’s phone number to Wang and asked whether he’d been contacted by it.

Eight minutes later, Strijker says, Wang responded with a screenshot of calls from the same number dating back months earlier.

RTL stands by its story. Koen de Regt, Strijker’s reporting partner, says Wang would have had little time to generate evidence of a phone call from the police station.

“We can't rule out that he has faked that screenshot,” said de Regt. “But, to my mind, it’s very unlikely that he did it.”

Strijker also said RTL confirmed that Dutch police were concerned for Wang’s safety.

Wang, though, has provided material that turned out not to be what he claimed. For instance, last September, Wang sent the Gao family a recording of a phone call. In a message the family provided, Wang claimed he was speaking to an officer from the German Federal Police. In fact, NPR recognized the voice as belonging to German journalist Jan Stremmel, who did a documentary on Wang.

When NPR sent the recording to Stremmel, he was flabbergasted.

“That’s absurd,” said Stremmel, who said he didn’t know that Wang had recorded him and that he had trusted Wang up until now. “That’s kind of shocking to be honest, and, no, I don't trust him.”

NPR had so many questions for Wang that we asked to meet him in person and he agreed.

“Anytime and anywhere,” Wang wrote.

But when the reporters arrived in Amsterdam for an interview, Wang said he was in Germany working on a documentary. Eventually, he agreed to talk but only by phone.

NPR asked about the imposter email accounts and the Gaos’ accusations that he’d stolen from them.

“This is ridiculous, and I promise I will sue all of them,” Wang responded, speaking over the din of a noisy restaurant where he said he was.

Wang also categorically denied making any bomb threats.

“Never,” he insisted. “This is, honestly, ridiculous.”

NPR asked about the recording that Wang sent the Gaos of the alleged German police officer who was — in fact — a German reporter.

“I really don't care what he said, because this is absolutely not the truth,” Wang responded.

Some of Wang’s answers changed over the course of NPR’s investigation.

For instance, Wang first claimed that the Gaos’ credit card bills were forgeries and that Gao had written the fake Dutch immigration emails himself. But in an interview six months later, he acknowledged that the Gaos had been cheated — just not by him.

Given all the accusations Wang faces, NPR asked whether he considers himself a fighter for human rights and democracy.

“This is a really big question,” Wang said after a long pause.

Wang then said he wasn’t an activist, a human rights defender or even someone devoted to opposing the Communist Party.

“I think I'm just a normal people,” he said.

This was quite a reversal. Wang appeared to be disavowing the public persona he’d spent years carefully crafting in media interviews and online.

He said opposing the Communist Party is “not my work. I mean, I don’t use it to make money or do anything.”

Chinese dissidents who live in free countries can serve a purpose in speaking out and highlighting China’s human rights abuses, but credibility is everything. Yaqiu Wang, China research director at Freedom House, says the Communist Party may have targeted Wang Jingyu — no relation — in the past, but she no longer trusts him as a source of information. She says some of his claims of repression threaten to undermine the vast majority of people with genuine accounts.

“When there's one person who's spreading false information, [that] makes the entire community less trusted by the public,” she says. Yaqiu Wang doesn’t like talking about these types of human right claims, but, she adds, “I came to this field to tell the truth, and this is part of the truth.”

What is the truth about Wang?

That's harder to say. His X feed offers a clue. It’s a stream of grievances against the party and claims of persecution in which Wang is both hero and victim.

Stremmel, the German reporter, has spent days interviewing Wang. He says Wang likes to surround himself with fellow dissidents who might be more “helpless” than him because they don’t speak English.

“He acts like the leader of the group,” Stremmel said.

Stremmel also describes Wang as nervous, stressed and troubled. He added that Wang wept when he spoke of his family back in China.

“He ended up being very vulnerable to me,” said Stremmel.

In June, Gao’s family finally arrived in the Netherlands. His wife, Liu Fengling, and daughter, Han, had ended up spending nearly four months in detention in Thailand.

In a video Gao sent of their arrival, he’s wearing aviator sunglasses in the summer sun. He has his arms around his wife and daughter. He’s laughing. Han brushes her hair from her face for the camera.

In a year of interviews, it was the first time that NPR had heard them laugh.

After they had settled into Gao’s house in the countryside, the couple spoke to NPR. Liu likes the Netherlands a lot more than Bangkok.

“It feels very quiet here, and the people are very welcoming,” she said, sitting next to her husband on the same couch he once shared with Wang. “They will say hello to everyone regardless of whether they know each other.”

But the couple says the ordeal in Thailand has left deep scars, especially on their son, Peng, who was away from home during the call. It was Peng who handed over the credit card details. He blames himself for the loss of the family’s savings. Liu says beginning in Thailand, Peng grew distrustful and quick to anger.

“It’s been a year and he’s not recovered,” she says. “Back in Thailand, he kept to himself in his room and wouldn’t come out.”

Gao blames himself, because he told his son he could rely on Wang.

“Of course, I chose to trust Wang,” Gao said. “After all, he lived with me. I went to the police department with him to report Communist harassment. In this case, who would you believe?”

Can't see the graphics in this story? Click here.

Frank Langfitt partnered with a fellow journalist to report this story. The reporter interpreted in interviews, pieced together the more than 700 emails and months of private messages, and interviewed Gao Zhi and his son, Gao Peng, for more than a dozen hours to untangle the alleged con. The journalist asked not to be named to protect their family. NPR China correspondent Emily Feng, China producer Aowen Cao, Asia editor Vincent Ni, researcher Barbara Van Woerkom, data reporter Nick McMillan and investigations producer Monika Evstatieva contributed to this story, as well as NPR’s managing editor of standards and practices, Tony Cavin. Photo editing was by Virginia Lozano, copy editing by Preeti Aroon and Digital project coordination by Desiree F. Hicks.

This story was edited by Robert Little, NPR’s chief investigations editor, and Barrie Hardymon, the Investigations Team’s senior editor.