Taipei - A Taiwan man has been indicted for posing as a woman and cheating his boss of money and gifts, a newspaper reported Wednesday. Yeh Wei-che, 28, a clerk at the Chinatrust Commercial Bank, on was indicted Tuesday on fraud charges, which carry a maximum seven-year sentence, the United Daily News said.

According to the News, Yeh hit upon the idea of fooling Chen, a deputy manager at the same bank, in October 2008 when he realized that Chen, 36, was single and desperate to find a girlfriend.

Seeing that Chen was not good at dating, Yeh introduced his "cousin sister, who was studying in New York," to Chen.

To create this fake "cousin sister," Chen downloaded a pretty girl's photo from the Internet and emailed it to Chen and began to chat with Chen via MSN, the News said.

After Chen had been lured in, his "girlfriend" began to ask for money and gifts under various excuses, such as that her room had been burglarized, she needed money to buy a gift for her mother, needed a notebook computer and her mother was seriously ill.

Knowing that Chen's father owns an instant-noodle company, this "cousin sister" said she wanted to eat instant noodles and asked Chen to send her a carton of instant noodles.

Chen was asked to give all the money and gifts to Yeh, so that Yeh would pass them over to the woman.

The "girlfriend" asked Chen to give Yeh 10,000 Taiwan dollars (300 US dollars) as a reward for introducing them.

In the last six months, Chen has given his non-existent girlfriend 250,000 Taiwan dollars (7,400 US dollars) and many gifts.

He became suspicious after his "girlfriend" recently said she was hospitalized and asked Chen to wire her 300 US dollars, but would not let him fly to New York to visit her.

Chen alerted police, who tracked the messages to Yeh, who was arrested. (dpa)