Darya Bulba () was a Ukrainian model who disappeared on August 6, 2016, in Shanghai, China. Her disappearance became the subject of various hoaxes and versions of what had happened. The police put forward different versions of the disappearance, from suicide to kidnapping, but never reached a consensus. Her fate remains unknown.
Background.
Daria Bulba was born in 1995 in Odesa, Ukraine. She studied at the Odesa College of Hotel Management, majoring in law, and took modeling courses, vocal lessons and learned to play guitar. Bulba attended a local modeling school. Since childhood she dreamed of becoming famous as a top model; in 2013 she received the first offer to participate in shoots and started shooting for catalogs. A few years later she went abroad - to Italy, Greece and Turkey.
Disappearance.
On April 7, 2016, Bulba flew to China to work on a contract with the Shanghai-based BYS Model Agency.
On August 6, 2016, Bulba went to meet an unknown man–some sources claim he was an acquaintance of hers–and disappeared. Surveillance cameras recorded the girl walking along the promenade, listening to music on headphones and dancing, before rounding the corner into a blind spot and disappearing.
The police investigated Bulba's phone and found out that she regularly received calls from unknown numbers. As reported by her friends, a stranger constantly scheduled meetings with the girl in the hotel, but never showed up for them. The network speculates that this was done in order to calculate how long it would take Bulba to get to a certain place.
Investigation.
The girl's relatives appealed to Interpol and local authorities. Daria's father e-mailed letters asking for help in finding his missing daughter to all central TV channels in Ukraine, but all of them remained unanswered. The Chinese police assumed that Bulba had committed suicide.
As of 2022, the case of Darya Bulba's disappearance remained open.
Influence.
Journalists, and other concerned people began investigating the case of Bulba's disappearance. On social networks, users recorded "detective" podcasts and videos in which they shared their opinions or conducted their own investigations in an attempt to find the model. None of the proposed versions of the model's disappearance has been confirmed. There are different versions of the disappearance: from kidnapping by criminal gangs and human trafficking to tragic cases on the water.
The local press wrote about the missing girl. One of the newspapers in the issue linked her disappearance to the alleged arrest of Hou Jianwen, a well-known rocket and space industry specialist in China, who was accused of espionage. Journalists put forward a version that the scientist recruited an agent network by means of "traps" – young and beautiful girls who worked for him and allegedly the girl could become one of them.