BEIJING, Jan 9 A Chinese company has duped about 400,000 people by creating the character

BEIJING, Jan 9 (Reuters) A Chinese company has duped about 400,000 people by creating the character of a young female nurse to solicit text messages and collect revenue from lonely men, a Chinese newspaper reported today.

The Beijing-based company employed a team of 12 or 13 people -- mostly men -- to act as ''Wang Jing'', a 22-year-old nurse who would invite mobile phone users to become her online boyfriend and to seek her out ''whenever they felt lonely'', the Beijing News said.

''Spending the whole day as a girl chatting to cheat people, I felt so disgusting,'' Yang Gang, a 26-year-old male science graduate and former employee, told the paper.

Yang said ''Wang Jing'' would ask mobile phone users flirty questions before luring them unwittingly into subscribing to the nurse's chat for 1.30-$3.80 dollars a month, the paper reported.

Yang, who would receive up to 2,000 text messages from people all over China in a single shift, said the nurse scam had reaped hundreds of thousands of yuan a month, the paper reported.

It said the service had drawn complaints but did not say if it was under investigation.

Text message scams and unsolicited spam flogging everything from real estate to weapons are common in China, where telecommunication service providers allow companies to bombard mobile phones for a cut of the profits.

REUTERS LL ND1156