When marriage is used as bait, some women find themselves on the hook.

Xuhui district police recently arrested a con man accused of swindling five women out of more than 1.2 million yuan ($194,896) by dangling marriage in front of them, local media reported. The man, surnamed Meng, met his victims on matchmaking websites, where he posed as a single, educated and successful businessman. From 2011 to 2013, Meng duped at least five women by pretending to be their suitor, going as far as to have children out-of-wedlock with two of them. Once he got the woman to trust him, he began asking to borrow money.

According to the district police, the 37-year-old came to Shanghai in 2006 and founded his own company in 2010. However, his company struggled, jeopardizing his personal finances. One day, while browsing a matchmaking website, it occurred to him that the site's female users could become a source of income.

It's not difficult to understand why Meng targeted these women. Most of them were over 30 and single, making them especially juicy targets and particularly vulnerable to his advances. Society has labeled women of this age "shengnü," or leftover women. These women are constantly bombarded with the message that they are past their prime  and their attractiveness is fading. At the same time, most women in their 30s have attained a degree of financial stability, which means they have at least some money to lend.

It might be hard for someone unfamiliar with China to understand why a successful woman would be so willing to lend money to someone she met on an online dating site. After all, Meng's scam was nothing new. It has been around as long as the matchmaking websites themselves.

Last March, for example, a woman with a master's degree sued the matchmaking website where she had met a man who claimed to be a CEO of a listed company, according to a report in the China Youth Daily. Their relationship ended when she discovered his was actually a married "peasant," but not before she had given him more than 100,000 yuan and had given birth to his child.

To understand why women continually fall for these scams, you have to understand the pressure that women over - or even approaching - the age of 30 are under in modern Chinese society. That pressure breeds desperation, which leads to costly lapses in judgment.

So although the majority of blame lies with the con men, who cynically and despicably took advantage of their victims' desperation, Chinese society bears much of the responsibility as well.

If we didn't have this bias against unmarried single women of a certain age, the victims of these scams might not have been so desperate, and consequently, so gullible. After all, they enjoy many advantages their younger selves didn't have: they are financially independent; they are more mature and sophisticated, and they are capable of choosing their own way of life.

Marriage should be the last criteria to judge whether a woman is successful. But sadly, it isn't.

Under the circumstances, women in their late 20s and 30s now have to look out for men who want to cheat them. Fortunately, the scam is easy to spot. If a man needs to borrow hundreds of thousands of yuan from a woman he has just met, his personal finances aren't in a good enough condition to get married. Borrowing that much money from a woman also shows how irresponsible he is. I understand that some women might lend him the money because they fear he might leave, but if he does leave, doesn't that show who he really is? Such crises can usually tell a woman more about a man than the promises he makes.