A Cameroonian student who was studying at Beijing’s Tsinghua University has been sentenced to 14 years of imprisonment with hefty fines and will be expelled from the country after he was convicted of the crime of fraud, according to Beijing News on Monday.
The Beijing 3rd Intermediate People’s Court made the verdict that the student, named Ossima Meko’o Frank Wilfrid had to pay a 140,000-yuan (around 20,700 US dollars) fine within ten days and will be expelled after he finishes the imprisonment. Wilfred’s banking accounts in China have also been frozen.
Wilfrid was met by Hu, an entrepreneur in Beijing on a matchmaking website in 2013 and developed a relationship one year later. Over the past four years, Wilfred has swindled around six million yuan (around 890,000 US dollars) out of Hu.
According to the court judgment which is left open to the public on the court’s website, Wilfred lied that he got his Master’s Degree at Oxford University and was recommended to study at Harvard for post-doctoral program by UN Environment and to have an internship at UN, so he needed financial support from Hu. He also said that he needed money to buy a house in Paris after they got married and to invest in a restaurant in Cameroon.
To meet Wilfred’s multiple requests, Hu was said to have sold her house in Beijing and even paid Wilfred’s living expenses and tuition fees in Beijing.
On the court, the country’s embassy in China confirmed that Wilfred had read the postgraduate at Beijing Normal University instead of Oxford while the investigations from the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau and Beijing People’s Procuratorate showed no record of exit to France from Wilfred and proved that he transferred the money from Hu to bank accounts in Cameroon and other accounts in Beijing.
Based on evidence and defense, the court defined Wilfred’s claims of investment and internship and house purchasing in Paris as a crime of fraud according to the country’s criminal law.
