A 25-Year-Old Illustrator Died Four Days After a Commission Scam Took 40,000 Yuan
The 25-year-old illustrator known as "No Grapefruit" fell to her death in Foshan four days after scammers drained 40,000 yuan from her through a fake-customer-service scheme; police ruled out a criminal case, and commission artists across China are sharing her story as a warning.
The illustrator worked the commission platforms under the name "No Grapefruit" (不吃西柚): 25 years old, based in Foshan, Guangdong, with a soft-edged, Japanese-inflected style and a price list on the marketplace Mihuashi starting at 270 yuan a piece. Colleagues told Red Star News her real rate for a finished illustration was closer to 250 yuan for six or seven hours of work.
On September 13 and 14, according to the account she left in her own community, a scammer posing as a customer-service agent for the secondhand marketplace Xianyu told her that her account had been frozen and that she would need to "flush transactions" through it to unfreeze the money. She was walked onto a Teams call, induced to scan codes and to open consumer-loan apps, and lost more than 40,000 yuan — about 24,000 of it borrowed.
On September 17 she posted that two days of intense drawing, meant to earn the debt back, had broken her; she asked her community to send commissions her way. In the early hours of September 18 she fell from the 32nd floor of her building. On September 30, police confirmed the death and said it was not a criminal case; the fraud investigation continues.
The summary that made the story travel carries the details that turned one artist's death into an industry-wide alarm: several other commission artists reported being taken in by the same script — the fake customer service, the frozen account, the "flushing" — and her monthly obligations, Huabei installments plus rent and expenses, ran past 8,000 yuan against an income counted in 250-yuan increments.
Her father wrote to her community to confirm what had happened; mourners gathered under her old posts on Xiaohongshu, where one commenter's line — "such beautiful paintings, and the platform never gave them traffic" — has been passed along as its own small indictment. The commission economy that supported her, with its marketplaces, price lists and anti-theft watermarks, runs exactly at the edge where one frozen account or one unpaid order becomes a debt spiral; this site has followed that edge before, in the case of the jailed "refund-only" buyer who placed 2,700 malicious orders against small sellers.
The fraud investigation is open. Her last commission ad, the one mourners keep screenshotting, reads: "250 yuan per piece, taking three."