It sold itself as a tell-all blog about the secret life of a Chinese prostitute, but the reality of a sex blog followed by hundreds of thousands could not be further from that sultry tale.

A married magazine editor was unmasked as the voice behind call-girl "Ruo Xiao", whose blog supposedly was created to expose her clients and reveal the sleazy side of the sex industry in China, The Shanghai Daily reported.

The blog featured translated copies of foreign literature and one piece a day titled 'Diary of a Sex Worker'.

Each entry expressed her feelings of being a sex worker and included details of sexual antics and discussions of prostitution with online followers.

260,000 people followed the blog; some urged her to give up the sex industry for writing while others called her 'China's most talented prostitute.'

It came to the attention of police when the prostitute named a list of her favourite clients out of 3,000 she said she'd served over the past seven years.

It was exposed as fraudulent by Chinese authorities after they tracked down the 31-year-old writer using his IP address.

They found out that not only was he pretending to be a sex worker, he was also plagiarising foreign romantic stories and passing them off as his own.

Once the long arm of the law caught up with him, however, he was fined 500 yuan ($80) for disturbing the social order.