Seven Women, One Tour Group, One Scam: China's Travel-Buddy Culture Meets Its Fraudsters

The trip fell apart before Huang's plane left the ground, though she only learned how completely once it landed. Huang, a young woman from Henan who had planned a solo holiday in China's northwest this July, told the service program Xiaoli Bangmang that she had found a travel companion online — a "dazi," in the vocabulary Chinese youth use for a partner in any single shared activity, from gym sessions to concert tickets. Feeling safer traveling with someone, she accepted the companion's recommendation of a tour package and paid the deposit.

Days before departure, the companion said she had broken her leg and could not come. Then, Huang said, she stopped answering. At the destination, the local operator demanded the balance of the tour fee, and Huang discovered she was not alone: seven single female travelers in her tour group, it emerged, had all been recruited by the same "companion," each told a different story at the last minute — one account circulating online claims the woman even sent a photo of a fatal car crash as her excuse for dropping out.

The story, carried by the Henan service program that took Huang's complaint, trended nationwide and drew commentary about what it reveals. The dazi trend is the signature social invention of post-pandemic young China: instead of a full friend or a partner, a stranger recruited for exactly one activity, no obligations beyond it. It suits solo travel in a country where a woman traveling alone may feel exposed — but the scam exploits precisely that logic. A fraudster poses as a like-minded stranger, chats for weeks to learn the victim's itinerary and budget, recommends a tour, then vanishes, leaving the victim to travel anyway — deposits paid, leave booked — or eat the loss.

"Many young people travel alone now and want to find a compatible dazi, and fall into a carefully woven trap," one popular comment explained: the scammer poses as a stranger with shared interests, builds trust over long chats, works out your travel plan, then recommends a temptingly priced tour — and the companion who promised to share the road disappears, stranding you in a group of strangers with high cancellation fees. Another poster read it psychologically: the desire for a perfect companion makes people "automatically screen out the obvious red flags," a gambler's trust that is itself the vulnerability.

The episode lands as Chinese authorities run repeated campaigns against online travel fraud, and as the dazi economy keeps generating new vocabulary and new disputes. For a generation that has turned stranger-matching into infrastructure, the lesson of Huang's tour group is an uncomfortable one: the same openness that makes a dazi easy to find makes a fake one indistinguishable until the bus has already left. One Weibo user put it bluntly: trust on a schedule is still a gamble. The scam, meanwhile, costs more than money — it spends the exact social confidence that made the trend work.