Fake Red Cross girl disowned
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Shanghai Daily, June 26, 2011
The Red Cross Society of China announced on its website that it has asked police to investigate a woman who kept showing off her extravagant lifestyle online and claimed to be general manager of Red Cross Commerce.
The announcement said the woman was using fake information to promote herself, which had damaged the reputation of the organization.
It was one of the three public announcements which were published late Friday in wake of an ongoing online incident where tens of thousands of netizens have turned their attention to the self-claimed 20-year-old woman named Guo Meimei on the microblog weibo.com.
After the woman displayed pictures of her luxury sports cars and dozens of designer handbags, numerous netizens were angered as they believed Guo was using donated money to fund her lavish lifestyle and they started to seek more information about the woman by themselves.
After cracking the password of Guo's online photo albums and searching for information about her using blogs and forums, more and more information indicating that she had a "close relationship" with the Red Cross started to emerge.
Some of the online posts are linking the woman with the Red Cross Society of China's Business System, a legal organization under the Red Cross Society of China that was established in 2001.
One of the posts claimed the business system worked together with a Shenzhen company to embezzle donations while Guo had an unknown relationship with the company's boss.
In response, the Red Cross published the other two announcements, issued separately by the business system and the Shenzhen company, Tianlue Group, which both deny the online accusation and their relationship with Guo.
Meanwhile, an investigation carried out into the business system by the Southern Metropolis Daily shows that although it was established under the Red Cross about one decade ago, the organization was never officially registered.
Facing doubts from netizens into the relationship between the system and the woman, its secretary-general Sun Lian told the newspaper that "it was ridiculous and obviously the woman's self-promotion."
