In the villages outside Handan, China, a bachelor looking to marry a local girl needs to have as much as $64,000, the price tag for a suitable home and obligatory gifts. That is a bit out of the price range of many of the farmers in the area.
So, in recent years, according to the Beijing News, local men turned to a Vietnamese marriage broker, paying as much as $18,500 for an imported wife, complete with a money-back guarantee in case the bride fled.
But that fairy tale soon fell apart. On the morning of Nov. 21, sometime after breakfast as many as 100 of Handan's imported Vietnamese wives, together with the broker, disappeared without a trace.