Man Detained for Fake Prostitution Reports Aimed at Girlfriend's Workplace
A 44-year-old man in Jiangxi spent six months phoning in fabricated prostitution complaints against the foot-spa where his girlfriend works, hoping inspections would push her to quit. Investigators traced the calls; he received five days of administrative detention.
For six months, police in Chongren County, in the eastern province of Jiangxi, kept receiving the same tip: a local foot-massage parlor was running prostitution, and someone ought to check it — ideally between 8 and 10 in the evening, the caller specified. Officers went, repeatedly, and found nothing. This month they found out who was calling.
According to a report by Qilu Evening News, citing the Guangzhou Daily, a 44-year-old man surnamed Ou placed repeated calls between March and September to 110, China's police emergency line, and to 12345, the government service hotline, claiming the foot-spa where his girlfriend works was involved in prostitution. On September 30, after investigators traced the reports and confirmed every one was fabricated, Ou was given five days of administrative detention.
His motive, once traced, was domestic. Ou, police said, did not want his girlfriend meeting other men while she worked, and one legal-affairs commentator who walked through the case noted his own admission: he hoped the steady rhythm of police inspections would pressure her to quit. For half a year, a public emergency system was repurposed as a private campaign against one woman's job.
That is the detail Chinese readers chewed on. A lawyer writing under the name Fazhe Qingfeng put the objection plainly: if a man minds that his girlfriend's parlor serves male customers, the reasonable options are for her to change jobs — or for him to change girlfriends. A lawfully run business, the lawyer wrote, has no obligation to "pay the price" of his insecurity.
The case lands in a system where both numbers Ou dialed carry weight. The 110 line exists for emergencies, and the 12345 hotline was built as the state's channel for citizen complaints about public services; turning either into a harassment tool is exactly what administrative penalties are meant to discourage. The costs run in two directions — officers dispatched on manufactured emergencies, and a legitimate business dragged through suspicion of "huang," the catch-all term for sex-related vice, which in China sticks even when an inspection finds nothing. Commentators made that point explicitly: false reports consume police resources and damage a merchant's reputation, and the remedy the law offers is detention.
Five days is the standard administrative term, not a criminal sentence, and Ou's file will close with it. The parlor, for its part, received the one thing it never asked for: official confirmation, again and again, that nothing there was wrong. Whether Ou's girlfriend keeps the job he was trying to end is not recorded anywhere in the case as reported — the only paper trail he left is the one that identified him.