A 19-year-old girl, who was accused of cheating online donors out of nearly 100,000 yuan by pretending to have lost her father in the Tianjin blasts, confessed to being guilty in trial on Wednesday, CCTV reported on Thursday.

In the court trial in Fangchenggang city in south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, the girl named Yang Cailan asked for forgiveness from the public.

She was charged with fraud after using her Sina Weibo account, the Chinese version of Twitter, to collect 96,576.44 yuan from 3,739 Weibo users by claiming that her father was killed in the explosions in Tianjin on Aug. 12, 2015.

After the explosions occurred, she published three posts on Aug. 13. First she wrote that she felt scared since her father worked near the blast site.

Two hours later, she updated that she still couldn’t contact him, and later she posted that her father had been found dead.

The posts drew a great deal of attention, and sympathetic netizens donated nearly 100,000 yuan.

But one day later, she told police that her account had been hacked and the posts were not published by her, which the police later found to be untrue.

The prosecutor in the case recommended an imprisonment of up to three years and six months since Yang’s behavior constitutes fraud.

Instead of surrendering herself to the police, she even lied about her actions after being reported, the prosecutor added.

But her lawyer asked the court for lenience since Yang is a first time offender.

All the donations have been returned. The final verdict has not yet been released.