A man in Shanghai has been sentenced to six and a half years in prison for exploiting the coronavirus outbreak via a particularly nefarious fraud scheme.

The man, surnamed Yan, tried to take advantage of a woman, surnamed Lu, who posted on WeChat in late January about wanting to buy 3M N95 masks to donate in the fight against the Covid-19 virus, according to local media reports.

Pretending to be a rich overseas returnee, Yan told Lu that he could quickly have a large number of masks shipped over to China from the United States.

Lu agreed to pay Yan 1.6 million yuan ($229,000) for 2,700 boxes of masks, paying him 160,000 yuan up front ($22,900) and buying him an iPhone 11 to boot.

Yan sent Lu a courier receipt on January 31 which appeared to show that the masks had been sent to China. On February 3, he claimed that they had arrived at the Beijing airport and asked for the remainder of the money she had promised him.

However, Lu said that she would only pay once she saw the masks. Yan, however, failed to provide a flight number, making her suspicious. Eventually, she went to the police.

Local prosecutors in Shanghai’s Minhang district argued that Yan should be sentenced to between six to eight years in prison for so flagrant a fraud scheme during such a turbulent time.

His lawyer attempted to assert that since Yan didn’t actually receive the full amount of money, he shouldn’t receive the full sentence.

However, this logic failed to persuade the court, which sentenced him to six and a half years in prison on Tuesday.

This was Shanghai’s first fraud case related to coronavirus epidemic supplies. Across the country, more than 1,000 people have been prosecuted for crimes related to the virus outbreak.