An online celebrity who had never revealed her face but was known for her "sweet and healing voice" and worshipped as a "cute goddess" by adoring fans, recently shocked them when a technical glitch during her live broadcast exposed her as a perhaps 40-something woman.

Online celebrities on Chinese live broadcast platforms can earn millions of yuan a month by chatting, teasing and play cyber games with their followers.

At first everything was going smoothly during the woman's live broadcast with another host on Douyu.com, a popular Chinese broadcast platform. As usual a superimposed cartoon covered her face while her cleavage was partly exposed.

Curious fans egged the woman to show her face but she refused. "I can't show my face until I received gifts worth 100,000 yuan ($14,507). After all, I'm a good-looking host," the woman teased her audience.

Followers immediately started clicking on on-screen icons sending her money. The largest pledge was 40,000 yuan. 

The woman with 277,000 followers didn't realize her superimposed disguise had disappeared from the screen, revealing her to have a face not nearly like the princess her fans assumed her to be.

She apparently finally noticed her face wasn't covered when some of the 2,833 people watching in her "room" for VIPs were quickly exiting. 

"Shocked," "heartbroken," "dream broken" were some of the comments left by followers who were apparently aghast that they had been drooling over a woman who seems in her 40s.  

"The bad woman lied to me that she would hang out with me! I sent her 40,000 yuan… Bad woman cheated my feelings!" a follower wrote perhaps not realizing he was the victim of his own imagination.

Global Times