At 37, Wang Zhuang had almost given up hope of finding a wife, until he saw the glossy matchmaking adverts.

They promised he wouldn't have to waste years on building a relationship that had no future. They offered to introduce him to a demure, devoted woman.

"The matchmakers said that girls from Guizhou are frugal," Wang says. "They told me they are good at running a household, able to do housework, and their families are very poor, so after marrying into your family, they would settle down and live a life with you."

So Wang travelled to Guiyang, a city in the southwestern province of Guizhou, in the hope of finding his soulmate.

He thought he had, when he was matched with a woman who seemed to tick every box. They had only met a few times before they married.

Then, almost as quickly as his new life had begun, it was over.

"My whole family has been thrown into chaos," he says, shaking his head.

He is still picking up the pieces more than a year after he discovered that everything he had been told by his wife was a lie.

She was a former karaoke hostess who'd been married three times, had three children, a serious sexually transmitted disease and was deeply in debt. She had even lied about her age.

He is fighting for a divorce and cannot return home to his old life - at least until he can recoup some of his life savings, which he says he paid to the agency within hours of being introduced to several potential matches.

"My parents blame me. I have insomnia and anxiety. I can't focus on work."

Wang's story is an extreme symptom of a demographic crisis that has long been in the making in China.

For decades, China's Communist Party decreed that couples could have only one child. They reversed course in January 2016 but by then the "one-child" policy, coupled with a preference for boys, had produced a shrinking pool of women and a stark gender imbalance.

There are now 30 million more men than women in China – that's more than the male population of the UK, or the entire population of Australia.

This has left men like Wang, who are in their late 30s and who live in smaller cities or far-flung, rural areas, with few options. Women in these places can afford to be choosy as they know they are in demand.

"The requirements for men are very high in my city. You need to have a car, a house and your family should preferably run a business," he says.

Many families also demand a high "bride price", a longstanding Chinese custom where the groom's family gives money to the bride. In parts of China, where men far outnumber women, this has become a significant financial burden.

Hence the appeal of matchmaking agencies like the ones in Guizhou, which are proposing a one-stop, quick solution - or "flash marriages".

Matchmaking agencies are hardly new in China, but many seem to be finding vulnerable targets in men who are struggling to find partners as they grow older.

So much so that state media recently reported that the industry had seen "rapid growth" which had "bred illegal practices and chaos".

It's hard to determine the scale of such fraud across China but it has grown enough to draw the attention of Chinese officials. Between January 2024 and March 2025, prosecutors handled cases involving 1,546 individuals for crimes related to the matchmaking industry.

This month, five separate authorities jointly launched a nationwide crackdown on the matchmaking industry after the issue generated "widespread public concern".

In one case, a matchmaking agency reportedly used karaoke waitresses as bait to defraud 128 victims of more than 2.5 million yuan (£274,000, $371,000).

"I think the government could introduce industry-specific regulations targeting flash marriage scams," Fan Binghe, from the Nanjing Office of the Beijing Jingshi law firm, told the BBC.

Although Guiyang has become synonymous with this booming "flash marriage" market, there is little to suggest it is a romantic hub.

The agency offices sit in a dense warren of buildings above a shopping precinct, where vendors sell local fruit and workers queue for takeaway sour soup rice noodles.

Wang, however, was convinced he could trust them after the company told him they would do a full background check and that he would be entitled to compensation if he was the victim of fraud.

So he paid up and the introductions began.

He met seven women in various "blind date" rooms over a few days while being carefully supervised by agency staff. He asked questions about where they came from, if they'd been married before and if they had any kids.

He set his heart on the eighth woman he met. He was hoping to meet someone who hadn't been married before, with no children and who was just a little younger than him.

"She also dressed very simply," he recalls. "She looked introverted and honest."

They met four or five times for just eight to 10 minutes each time. He says they had been under strict instructions not to exchange phone numbers or any details on private messages, or they would be fined.

After two or three days he decided she was the one and he agreed to pay her a substantial bride price. "I spent more than 300,000 yuan [$44,000]," he says, with a pile of well-thumbed legal papers in hand to prove it.

"If you include the wedding banquet and everything else, I spent around 400,000 to 500,000 yuan."

The whole process was documented by the matchmaking agency in a series of glossy photos, which they also use to advertise their services on Chinese social media.

In the video the couple are holding hands on a red carpet and smiling while romantic music plays in the background.

Just months into the marriage, debt collectors started calling, alleging she owed them money.

Wang grew suspicious and wanted to know what else she had kept hidden. He checked her phone and found details of her former life, her birth certificate and former marriage documents.

When he confronted her, she offered him a divorce, but refused to return a single penny of the bride price.

He says he tried to hunt down the agency responsible for his marriage, but when he returned to their offices, they had packed up and disappeared.

From his rented flat in Guiyang, just across from the main district which houses most of these agencies, Wang now spends his time making social media videos trying to warn other men about what can go wrong.

In Guiyang, it is difficult to find an agency where the staff is willing to talk. One agency boss agreed to talk to us in their offices – although his business partner later asked us to leave.

Inside there was a red carpet littered with fake petals ready for a proposal. He told us a couple had pledged to marry just hours before we arrived.

"There's a huge market for flash marriages in China. It only really emerged over the last two or three years," he told us.

The agencies claim families here did not strictly adhere to the one-child policy, which means the area has a larger pool of women. "Even if a family had two or three daughters, they would keep trying for a son," one of them told the BBC.

They say they are now trying to match these women with men from central provinces – like Wang who lives in Hebei – who are relatively wealthy but have few women around them.

"Our clients are free to choose whoever they like. The purpose of our business is to help people find someone they genuinely want to be with."

One of the advertisements assures their prospective clients that "Three days with the right introduction can beat three years of dating".

A sign reading "blind date room"

It was in a room like this where Wang met his bride

Wang now spends his time trying to help other victims of similar spiels.

His rented flat is full of men who are either searching for the owners of the agency who scammed them, or are trying to recoup their losses from their wives who ran off after only a few weeks of marriage.

On a fold-up bed by the window, 59-year-old Xu Rulin from Jiangxi province pulls his carefully collated evidence out of a red plastic shopping bag.

He spent nearly 500,000 yuan trying to find his son a wife through a "flash marriage" agency.

Together they travelled to Guiyang - more than 1,000km away - and his son wed just seven days after he first met his bride in a "blind date" room.

Xu says after the marriage was registered, she demanded they buy her an iPhone and transfer around 20,000 yuan to help her with her business. She also asked for 120,000 yuan for a wedding dress and jewellery, he claims.

"All I wanted was for her to genuinely settle down and live with us," he told us. "She said she wanted a house and I agreed to buy one for them. It was all agreed."

But he says she ran away after living with them for less than two weeks. She has been detained by the police, and the couple have been able to get divorced.

He says the owners of the matchmaking company were also arrested in January this year, but he is still in Guiyang trying to recover some of the losses.

The agency manager the BBC spoke to admitted there were no formal background checks on their clients.

"The women are introduced by local matchmakers who already know them very well. They know their family background because they're often from the same village. The male's matchmaker also usually knows the man very well."

They would not say how much their services cost because that information was "confidential".

He did say that if the information provided by either side is not truthful, then the client is entitled to get their money back.

"I'd say more than 90% of what our clients tell us here is true," he claimed.

"We have a saying here in China. One rotten mouse dropping spoils the whole pot of soup. That's exactly what it's like. We regularly attend meetings with the local police. If a matchmaking agency is found to be involved in marriage fraud, it will be held legally responsible."

This brings little comfort for those who have lost whatever money they had saved.

"I never imagined that with the agency charging such a high service fee, a local matchmaker in her hometown checking her background and the company offering so many guarantees, that the women's information would turn out to be completely fake," Wang says.

He is almost resigned now to his losses. And he blames himself for falling for the scam: "Only women with problems would agree to these kind of flash marriages."

He has kneeled at the police offices in Guiyang pleading for them to help him get his money back and he has even travelled to Beijing to urge the authorities to do more to combat this type of crime.

These cases are difficult to prosecute, says Fan Binghe, the lawyer who has handled many.

For one, Chinese law has no specific criminal offence which covers this kind of marriage fraud, and so to bring criminal charges, a victim has to establish that the aim of their spouse was always to take their money.

"In cases I've handled, suspects often argue that they genuinely intended to marry and live a good life but realised they were incompatible, had conflicts, and decided to end the relationship," he says.

"In situations like that, the line becomes blurred. Relationship issues are difficult to disprove."

Even harder is getting money back from sham matchmaking agencies which often shut up shop as soon as they have made enough cash.

Wang has managed to get some money back, but not all.

"After going through something like this, I don't even know if I can still get married. It was already hard for me to find someone. And now I've spent so much money. I won't consider it now."

Wang's life, and the life of the men in the apartment, all appear to be in limbo.

"It has taken almost two years, and even now I still don't know when I can divorce her," he says, surrounded by his legal paperwork.

"I don't know when this will be resolved, so I can restart a normal life. It feels endless." (BBC)

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