Nineteen Chinese men looking for love found themselves sharing two wives and tricked out of more than 2 million yuan (USD 312,000) in a marriage scam, authorities in Inner Mongolia said earlier this week, writes South China Morning Post.

The two women and their three accomplices were recently detained after one of the victims saw his “wife” as a bride at another wedding and called police, according to a WeChat post by the police bureau of the autonomous region’s Urad Front Banner on Monday.

The crime syndicate managed to persuade the men to avoid official marriage registration and get betrothal gifts worth a total of over 2 million yuan in the past two years, the post said.

Most of the victims were from rural areas and above the average marriage age, a group of men that have long been a topic of public discussion owing to the difficulties they face finding a partner due to China’s lopsided gender ratio.

The country has 17.52 million more men aged between 20 and 40, regarded as the marriageable age, than women in the same age group, China’s latest population census has found. Older unmarried men are particularly common in rural regions, where a preference for younger men prevails.

The case surfaced when an unnamed 35-year-old villager in Urad saw his newly-wedded wife marrying another man from a nearby town while watching videos on a live streaming app in March, according to the police post.

Together with his family, he found the other husband and sought police assistance after both of them realized they were being scammed.