The online dating pool can be murky and filled with shady peeps, which is why we hear horror stories of romances gone wrong every once in a while. Take, for example, this Taiwanese man, who went on a date with a woman he met on WeChat, and ended up burning a hole in his wallet in just one evening.
According to Shin Min Daily News, the 25-year-old was befriended by a female on the app last Friday, and the duo got to talking. The lady, who went by the username “Invisible Wings,” got the conversation going with small talk questions like “how’s work?” before she slid in the fact that she was in a break-up slump. She then claimed she wanted to have a drink, but had no company as she was new to Singapore and didn’t know anyone here.
As the man tried to comfort her, he eventually agreed to meet up at a shopping mall along Selegie Road that same evening. Dinner was easy enough — the pair hit up McDonald’s for a fast food meal. But then the woman suggested having drinks at a bar on the same floor, and that’s when things went wrong for the dude.
He told the Chinese publication that the woman ordered what looked like a glass of red wine after perusing the menu, but it purportedly did not taste of alcohol. She asked if he wanted one too, but when the wait staff came up to him with the bill, her drink amounted to a whopping S$263.
Probably feeling light-headed himself by now, the man paid for her drink, gave her an excuse, and fled the bar.
Later on, he researched incidents similar to what happened to him and chanced upon a popular scam in China used by bar employees. Apparently, the staff would pretend to make friends with strangers online and lure them to the watering hole to coax them into ordering exorbitantly-priced drinks.
Having learned about the scam the hard way, the man said he hoped others would be alert to such schemes from now on.
Meanwhile, the comments section of Facebook was rife with netizens chiding the poor dude for choosing to pay the bill when he could’ve walked off. One person gave him a tip on how to weed out the gold diggers from the genuine dates…
…and another offered this cynical but wise piece of advice.
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