That verdict became a sensation, and the more interested I became in the case of Little Yueyue, the more I noticed that practically every person I met had heard about the “Peng Yu case.” Often people volunteered similar stories: a helpful young member of the urban middle class done in by a gimlet-eyed scam artist. The lesson never changed: what little you have assembled in life can be gone in an instant. After a young man named Chen was falsely accused of injuring a cyclist, he told reporters, “I really don’t know if I will help out again if I encounter a similar situation.”
