Things You Can Buy In China

Someone to serve your prison sentence for you.

What we have here is a practice called ding zui- 'substitute criminal'. What happens is, you get really rich, you commit a crime, then you get some poor person who may or may not look kind of like you, and you pay him to do the time. This is apparently a practice dating back to at least the 1800's, and back then you could even hire someone to be executed for you if the price was right. I'm not sure what kind of DNA testing or fingerprinting the cops do over there, but it seems not to matter, as they appear to not only not give a rat's ass, but they in fact have never given a rat's ass. After all, they figure, the rich guy who actually did it has paid 'market value' for the crime, right? Whatever the hell that's supposed to mean?

So it's basically been left to the Internet to try and bust people attempting to ding zui their way out of their sentence by, oh, I don't know, comparing some goddamned photographs. Not that this stops the cops from shrugging their shoulders and going 'meh, they're probably wrong or something, pass the donuts'.

This is a thing that happens.