Man who faked "South China Tiger" photo sentenced to 2 years and 6 months

Here's the story from Caijing; here's the AFP report. He got two years for fraud and 18 months for unlawful possession of ammunition; the two sentences were combined to a single term of two and a half years.

One issue was where exactly the fraud occurred. The defendant, Zhou Zhenglong, apparently received a reward of 20,000 yuan from the Shaanxi provincial forestry department, but this seems to have been an ex gratia payment, not a payment on a pre-existing reward promise. It seems likely to me that Zhou is just a dumb schmuck who one day woke up and acted on a bad and poorly thought-through idea, and then got caught up in something way beyond his imagination and control. Now he has lost two years from his life for embarrassing provincial officials.