Woman Gets Plastic Surgery To Escape $3.7 Million Debt And The Story Only Gets Worse From There

China has a debt problem. More specifically, Chinese citizens are suddenly drowning in debt after the country opened the door to personal lending in 2014. Now people are borrowing money so recklessly that at least one woman literally rearranged her face in order to avoid paying back her $3.7 million debt. It almost worked, too.

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A 59-year old woman from the central Chinese city of Wuhan transformed her appearance through plastic surgery in order to avoid 25 million yuan ($3.71 million) of personal debts, state news agency Xinhua said.

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She thought it would be like a smooth kind of criminal changing her face through a plastic surgery, but Zhu Najuan, 59-years old, failed unexpectedly.

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Police recently arrested a 59-year-old woman named Zhu Najuan, who went missing after a court in central China’s Hubei Province ordered her to pay the above-mentioned $3.7 million debt earlier this year, according to Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency.

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“We were very surprised at the scene…she looked in her thirties and was different from the photos we had,” a policeman said in a report posted at a China-state-owned Xinhua news agency.

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Zhu confessed that during her time on the run, she had used other people's ID cards to buy herself railway tickets and had borrowed bank cards to support herself in her new life -- it's not clear who would loan someone $3.7 million in debt their bank card.

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She will be facing series of crimes which include cases of fraud or identity theft on top of her original pending court order to pay her the huge debt.

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Since China opened its door to personal lending in 2014, Chinese people are borrowing money so recklessly until they drowned from millions of debts. Reports also said that Chinese citizens do absurdly drastic and odd things in an attempt to escape their responsibilities of paying their debts.

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Xinhua said the city of Wuhan has also launched a series of crackdowns on debt defaulters and detained a total of 186 people in the first half of the year.

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Just last year, local press reported on a 33-year-old father in Wenzhou who found himself in almost $450,000 of debt. After three of his creditors beat him up, the debtor abducted his own son and sold him to someone he’d met in an online chat room. How much was this young human’s life worth? According to the desperate beaten man in debt: $6,500. The little boy lived with the stranger for a week, before his father was arrested in an internet cafe.

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The most troubling thing about the story is that it seems increasingly common for Chinese citizens to become so buried in debt that they do absurdly drastic things in an attempt to break free.