A woman in Luzhou, Sichuan province, was cheated out of 80,000 yuan ($13,000) by a hacker who had pretended to be her son online, Western China Metropolis Daily reported on March 17.

While surfing the Internet at home on Nov 23, Yu got a message from what she believed was the QQ instant-messaging account of her son, who is studying abroad. The person on the fake account chatted with her about familiar subjects before asking for money to pay for a class in foreign-language skills.

Yu sent the money to the provided bank account, but when she tried to talk to her son online again, she discovered that the QQ account had been deleted. After phoning her son, Yu realized she had been cheated.

Police said they discovered that somebody had sent Yu a web link that had a virus that allowed the hacker to steal her QQ account. The hacker learned about her family by observing logs of her conversations with her son. The hacker then logged onto Yu's QQ account and deleted the son's QQ number there, replacing it with the hacker's own QQ number.

Earlier this month, police apprehended a suspect in a village under the administration of Nanning, capital of the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.