Woman Receives 20 iPhones from 20 Boyfriends, Sells Them for a House
Toggle Dark Mode
Housing prices in China have been on the up and up as of late, shattering records and making homeownership all but unaffordable to many residents of its largest cities. Nowhere is this more evident than in the unlikely story of one Shenzhen-based woman, who convinced her 20 boyfriends to buy her an iPhone 7 each, which she then sold to put a down payment on a house.
The stranger-than-fiction story first surfaced in Chinese social media, when a blogger using the pseudonym Proud Qiaoba penned a description of the hustle perpetrated by her crafty colleague, dubbed Xiaoli (also not a real name). The BBC was able to confirm the tale’s veracity, which many initially doubted.
According to the blog, Xiaoli comes from a modest financial background and was likely under immense pressure to purchase a house for her aging parents. Thinking outside the box, she concocted a scheme to convince her 20 lovers to each buy her an iPhone 7– a sentence which strains credulity on so many levels. As the BBC reports, among the many aspects of the story, Chinese netizens expressed shock that all of her hapless boyfriends were actually able to acquire iPhone 7s, which only launched in September of this year and have been selling like hotcakes.
In any event, Xiaoli took the freshly purchased iPhones to a mobile recycling plant and exchanged them for 120,000 yuan ($23,200), enough to put down a deposit on a house and earn her internet infamy. Xiaoli’s tale has generated a lot of buzz in China and beyond, where users expressed a mixture of admiration, awe, and disdain for her brazen actions. While the morality of Xiaoli’s behavior is debatable, her story certainly demonstrates both the power of creative thinking and the financial clout of the iPhone 7.
