Chinese man changes locks on vacant flat, sells it to unsuspecting couple for US$103,000
A Chinese man changed the locks on a vacant apartment and claimed ownership before selling it to a couple for US$103,000. The buyers later learned the property was still owned by the original landlord and reported the fraud to authorities. Police have arrested the suspect and are investigating the case.
- ▪The man altered the locks on an unoccupied flat and presented himself as the owner.
- ▪He sold the flat to a couple for US$103,000, who believed the transaction was legitimate.
- ▪The original landlord attempted to reclaim the property, revealing the deception.
- ▪The couple reported the incident to police, leading to the suspect's arrest.
- ▪Authorities are investigating the fraud and warning the public to verify property ownership before purchase.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | South China Morning Post |
| Canonical URL | https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/article/3358378/chinese-man-changes-locks-vacant-flat-sells-it-unsuspecting-couple-us103000?utm_source=rss_feed |
| Publication time | Fri, 26 Jun 2026 01:00:23 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-26T01:33:41.038Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-26T01:33:41.038Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Ul0SOusJJ6lK |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at South China Morning Post.