Beijing - A Chinese farmer who posed as a Qing Dynasty princess has been sentenced to 13 and a half years in prison for scamming victims out of 2.3 million yuan (380 000 dollars).
Wang, a 49-year-old woman from central Henan province, allegedly told people she needed to borrow money to bribe authorities to release royal assets worth 175 billion yuan.
She said she would reward them three times their investment and offered fake gold bars, fake dollars and homemade treasure maps as collateral, the official Xinhua news agency reported late on Tuesday.
Wang’s accomplice, a 47-year-old man from the north-western province of Xi’an, was sentenced to 12 years for helping Wang to scam several victims between February 2013 and July 2014, it said.
The court also ordered them to repay all the money to the victims.
Both defendants appealed the sentences.
DPA