After a Melbourne Knife Attack, a Chinese Graduate's Friend Vanished With His 54,000-Dollar Medical Fund
Fang, 28, lost two fingers in a November 8 attack after a card game at his landlord's flat in Melbourne. The fund his family raised for his surgery went to a friend he had known five months — who then went silent.
The attack came first. In the early hours of November 8, Fang, a 28-year-old graduate of Monash University in Melbourne, was invited to his landlord's apartment to play cards. A small dispute over money broke out, and the landlord's other guests took his side, as Fang's account to Jimu News describes. One of them fetched a kitchen knife and slashed his knee and severed two of his fingers. The attacker, whom Fang identified as a man with a prior criminal record who had once been on local news, fled; police are still looking for him.
The betrayal came second. Facing surgery, Fang could not pay: he holds a single Australian bank card, which he lost some time ago and never replaced. His family and friends raised 54,000 Australian dollars — roughly 250,000 yuan — and, on his request, sent it to Laura, the Chinese-style pseudonym for a fellow Chinese student he had known for four or five months and trusted, so she could settle the hospital bills. After the money arrived, she stopped answering. His WeChat requests go unaccepted, and her family's phones in China are switched off.
A screenshot shared alongside his account shows one transfer of the fund — a payment of 19,000 Australian dollars dated November 7, to a recipient whose surname matches the friend's. Fang has reported the matter to Australian police and contacted the Chinese consulate-general in Melbourne. A friend caring for him in hospital showed the reporter an email exchange with police: once his condition allows, he is to give a statement at a police station in Melbourne's west, and the police wrote that they will help him recover the money.
On Weibo the case struck a double nerve — the stranger's knife, then the friend's pocket. One widely forwarded comment put it as being "attacked in person, then stabbed in the back by someone familiar". Part of what resonates is the workaround itself: students abroad commonly route money through a trusted friend's account when their own banking is tangled. There has been scepticism too — some users note the story's many elements and decline to take it at face value.
It is the second case in a week to put Melbourne and its Chinese community on China's trending boards, after the killing of a Chinese delivery rider there turned vigils into a protest over platform safety.
For now the ledger stands as Fang left it: an attacker at large, a fund missing, and a statement at a Melbourne police station waiting for him to heal.