A Chinese student, Allen Xu, 29, has been ordered by an Australian court to repay his mother, Jiyun Ma, almost $5million and two properties after squandering a large portion of the roughly $18million she gave him to invest in Sydney real estate. The Supreme Court of Victoria and a subsequent Court of Appeal both rejected his claim that the money was a gift, ruling largely on the strength of remorseful WeChat messages in which Xu admitted the funds were never his and called himself "a greedy person, a dishonest person, an immoral person, and a very bad person".

Ms Ma, who has never visited Australia, began sending money in 2020 to help her son qualify for a business investment visa and fund his studies, later transferring nearly $2million for a Haymarket property and a further $11.1million in nine instalments between July 2021 and May 2022 to be invested on her behalf. Instead, Xu spent the money on cosmetic eyelid surgery, luxury goods, a car and an apartment in Wentworth Point, while misleading his mother about a bank account he had opened in his own name rather than his father's. When Ms Ma discovered the deception in mid-2022, Xu drafted apology messages with his uncle's help, confessing to lying about the funds and admitting he had no right to the money.