Who's Lena Li, 35-year-old S'porean former 'Citibank' staff & global model on 'Vogue' & 'Cosmo' & why has no one ever heard of her?

A 35-year-old former Citibank employee-turned-model was recently nominated for "Emerging Star" at this year's Influencer Magazine Awards (IMA).

Not only that, she has purportedly graced the covers of Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and FHM.

And she's academically accomplished to boot, having attended the University of London, the University of Saskatchewan, and the University of York.

Lena Li has come a long way from her banking days, where she supposedly worked in the public relations department.

And all that success has come only one year after her purported stint at Citibank.

Despite her meteoric rise, she still hasn't forgotten her Singapore roots.

Here she is in front of Merlion Park.

But don't think she's just your average tourist attraction-enjoyer either.

Here she is in front of a bus stop along Braddell Road.

She loves Singapore very much.

She's also been featured in the local news recently, first for warning folks that fake accounts were using photoshopped images of her to scam people.

And more recently, for her nomination at the IMA, where she is in contention to be the first Singaporean to win the award.

While all this success is commendable, it just leaves us with one question, who is this person???

Who is Lena Li?

Li, according to a Daily Star (UK) article on Oct. 13, 2024, had been working in Citibank but kept getting told off for wearing revealing outfits.

Here's her job history on LinkedIn.

That's potentially over a decade of conservative finger wagging.

Luckily, she was able to escape the puritanical halls of Citibank when she got headhunted by a modelling agency.

This eventually landed her on the covers of Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and FHM, among others.

Luckily for Li, her uptight conservative parents aren't very Internet savvy, or they would be horrified at what their daughter was up to by then.

But what is their daughter's claim to fame?

Cover story

Li's profile raises some questions, without even too much sleuthing.

Remember the magazine covers, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and FHM?

If you look carefully, it's actually Vogue Monaco, Cosmopolitan Canada and FHM Singapore.

According to Wikipedia, there is no Canadian version of Cosmopolitan, FHM Singapore closed a while back, and as for Vogue?

Here are some covers for Vogue.

Here are Vogue Monaco's covers.

Just to be sure, we emailed Vogue to see if they had an affiliate called Vogue Monaco.

They didn't reply, but about a week later, the Vogue Monaco Instagram was taken down.

Which then makes these kinds of captions slightly suspect.

Cosmopolitan told Mothership that Cosmopolitan Canada was not associated with them.

Ok fine, the magazines are iffy, but the cover girl part is legitimate, right?

Not exactly.

Here's a photo Li posted on Jun. 24, 2025.

Here's a photo of Emma White, an Instagram model, posted on Mar. 26, 2024.

And the photos that bear a striking resemblance to Emma's photos don't just end there.

In fact, it seems there's a readily identifiable reference picture for nearly every post Li has put up.

Even the patriotic birthday wish appears to resemble an unrelated, much earlier, Instagram post by White.

Sad.

Also, remember the video that got Li first noticed by local media?

The one where she was bemoaning how fake accounts were using photoshopped images of her to scam people.

Here is her video in 2025.

Here is White saying the same thing, with the same pose, in 2022.

Very meta.

White spoke to Mothership and shared that she had tried reaching out to Li, or whoever is running the account, but had been blocked.

Ok, so both the magazines and the cover girl aspect are a bit suspect.

What about the story?

Citibank roots

So, how legitimate is the Citibank claim?

Here was her LinkedIn a few weeks back.

This would mean that the 35-year-old Li would have been 11 when she started working at Citibank.

The job scene was really different back in the early 2000s.

Alternatively, it could have been an honest mistake, as Li updated her profile to reflect her current job experience following the publication of the local articles.

So now she would have been 19 when she started her internship, age-wise much less child labour-ish, but still a bit young.

To confirm, we reached out to Citibank, which told Mothership:

“We have not been able to trace any record of a Dr Lena Li having worked as an Intern or a Public Relations Manager for Citi Singapore."

Even without their confirmation, the timeline seems shaky, with other media pre-2025 featuring Li.

For example, a 2024 interview referencing her 2023 FHM Australia cover.

But if the LinkedIn record is true for both years, she should still have been stuck in the halls of Citibank.

In fact, this woman, or AI creation or something, was already going by "Mercy Li" before the doctor persona.

Ok, investigation complete. This person, or group of people, obviously concocted a complete lie about working as a PR consultant in a bank in Singapore, took the body from some other lady, and made up an AI face.

Which was what I thought, until I saw this.

Ok, don't look at the obvious thing and focus on the timestamp. 2021.

Which is before the earliest 2022 Emma White reference picture/video.

What???

What???

Digging deeper

Ignoring the increasingly complex labyrinth of what was real or fake, Lena Li or Mercy Li or BustySingaporean (another profile I found that used the same photos), one thing jumped out at me.

How unfiltered she looked here.

The current Lena Li's pictures and videos on her Instagram have an uncanny valley feel to them (in my view), which makes sense now that we suspect those pictures had a head basically superimposed on another body.

But this photo of Mercy Li didn't even look like it had been run through a filter. Which then blew the timeframe wide open.

We were no longer sifting gingerly through the 2020s, the 2000s were now in play.

A reverse image search of Mercy Li also provided way more results.

All these photos were labelled Lena Li, not Mercy, but the dates were from way earlier than 2025.

The last few photos were captioned Glamourcon 42, which, according to Google, is a fan convention for glamour models for magazines like Playboy, and the 42nd edition took place in 2007.

A picture of this woman from an earlier Glamourcon looks a bit like the purported Lena Li of today, only incredibly filtered and perhaps AI-enhanced.

The search results also led us to other interviews by someone who looks strikingly like Glamourcon Lena Li, such as this 2015 interview on Autobabes with someone called Li Ling Ling.

Now we have to be very clear. We're still not sure if this woman, aka Li Ling Ling, is the same Lena Li in the Glamourcon photos, or the more recent Vogue Monaco cover girl Dr Lena Li.

However, there appear to be some overlaps, including the Singapore connection and the PR consultant role. She also apparently loves spicy food.

Autobabes Li Ling Ling also revealed that she was drawn to the idea of a "Succubus (female demon)".

Funnily enough, the account Lena Li claims is impersonating her is called Ling Ling Li.

But who else was there at the same time as the alleged Li for these pictures, especially the ones at Glamourcon?

Speaking to Mothership, John Chennavasin told us that the lady in those Glamourcon pictures was indeed known as Lena Li, but he didn't know her as Singaporean ex-Citibank PR consultant Lena Li.

Instead, he referred to her as a Taiwanese-American Playboy model from the early 2000s.

That descriptor also happened to tally with this Playboy write-up about a Lena Li back in 2002.

Similar love of spiciness as well.

Chennavasin wasn't sure where Li is now, but noted that the woman in the 2015 Autobabes interview, Singaporean Li Ling Ling, was the same woman as Taiwanese-American Lena Li, but he said that the bio appeared to be entirely fictional.

Who are you?

1. Is the Instagram account of Dr Lena Li run by Li herself?

2. Has she been using images and videos from other models with her face superimposed on them?

3. Is Dr Lena Li the same person as Taiwanese-American model Lena Li, who appeared at Glamourcon and in Playboy magazines back in the 2000s?

4. Did she ever work for Citibank?

5. Is she actually Singaporean?

Those were basically the questions we sent to Li's email account, which could be found on her Instagram. We'll get to her replies later.

An older story

Ok to recap, 2025 influencer Lena Li is up for an influencer award, that Lena Li appears to have gone by other pseudonyms such as Bustysingaporean and Mercy Li.

One of the pictures found on a 2021 post under Mercy Li, shows a woman who looks identical to a Taiwanese-American glamour model also called Lena Li back in the late 2000s.

This 2000s Lena Li also looks identical to a Li Ling Ling that appears in the 2010s, and claims to be Singaporean.

It is this introduction of the name Li Ling Ling that leads to the next shocking revelation.

In 2011, there was a story that made international-ish news. Numerous blogs and forums around the world discussed it, even making its way onto some Taiwanese news sites.

It also made the pages of Singapore's Shin Min Daily News.

The story was about a Singaporean woman, 36, who had nudes from her laptop leaked by a computer repairman in America.

Interestingly enough, the woman had graduated from the University of London, Saskatchewan, and York.

She worked for a Singaporean branch of an American bank as a, you guessed it, PR professional.

After some sleuthing from the Shin Min reporters, they found that the woman, named Li Ling Ling, also went by an online moniker you might find familiar, "Bustysingaporean".

Two very, very similar stories, with seemingly the same profile, 14 years apart.

Here's part of the profile of "BustySingaporean", as surfaced on a blog during that time.

Now, if we assume the Taiwanese Playboy model Lena Li and the Autobabes cover model Li Ling Ling are the same person, this profile helps to circle some squares, kinda.

She is Taiwanese, yes, but was purportedly raised in Singapore.

She also mentioned the same three universities: London, Saskatchewan, and York.

Then comes the question of the bank. While Shin Min didn't name the bank, the write-up mentions her working at a bank in Millenia Tower.

That's quite vague, but it's worth noting Citi's presence there during that time.

For what it's worth, Citibank also couldn't find a person called Li Ling Ling who fits this description.

“We have not been able to trace any record of a Dr Lena Li or a Li Ling Ling having worked as an Intern or a Public Relations Manager for Citi Singapore.”

Quick/ alternative recap

Ok, it's getting a bit complicated now, so let's just look at the claims made by the most recent version of Lena Li.

The thing about webs is that they're always going to get tangled.

As mentioned above, here was what current Lena Li sent to Stomp to show that a scammer was pretending to be her.

She told them:

"This scammer pretended to be me and used my picture or video in my social media to convince my followers that they are actually talking to me,"

So they used her picture.

Which implies this person is also the current actual Li.

Interestingly enough, this photo appears to be the same one that was taken by John Chennavasin for Glamourcon back in 2008.

Which, as you would recall, is the same lady who supposedly, eventually, took on the mantle of Li Ling Ling, and all the other pseudonyms.

Tadah.

Asking Lena

So who is Lena Li? Is she Li Ling Ling? If not, why are their stories so similar?

And if it is the same person, is the same person peddling this story 14 years apart (2011 to 2025)? Or is someone else, a group even, recycling this story from a decade ago for whatever reason now?

Also, can Lena Li Ling Ling only appear during election years?

These questions were at the back of my mind as an email notification came in.

In the following email, Li insisted that she was legitimate.

She explained away the Mercy Li pseudonym as "mere insurance" that Citibank wouldn't figure out it was one of their staff glamour modelling around the world.

She also insisted that Lena Li from Playboy and her are two "entirely different individuals" who "happen to share the same name".

She further reiterated that she was born in Singapore, holds a Singaporean IC, and has "full citizenship rights, including the right to vote."

Despite the revelation that election year Lena Li Ling Ling could still be a possibility, the rest of the email was rather pedantic.

In it, Li reiterated her credentials and educational qualifications.

London, Saskatchewan, York, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, FHM.

The same words used again and again by Lena Li, Li Ling Ling, Mercy Li, BustySingaporean, sometimes decades apart.

While the first few emails were smooth sailing, the replies became more guarded after I brought up the Citibank rebuttal, Li Ling Ling pictures from the 2010s, and reference images from Brunette Bunny.

She has since privated her social media accounts, but Mothership understands she is still posting regularly.

We will update the story if Lena Li provides further information.

Mothership has also reached out to several more individuals associated with Li, but has not received any replies. We will update the article if and when they do get back to us.

Why?

So here's what we can definitively say. Li is not a 35-year-old former Citibank employee, and she has not modelled for publications like the actual Vogue or Cosmopolitan.

Her credentials and background appear eerily similar to those of Li Ling Ling, who was in the news briefly back in 2011.

Her photos appear to also be taken from an Instagram model called Brunette Bunny.

Interestingly enough, this last phenomenon has been happening for a while.

An investigation by Australian outlet ABC highlighted how a creator of an AI porn star would take videos from influencers and then replace their face with said porn star.

One of the more nefarious parts of that story was how a fifteen and sixteen-year-old, among others, had their likeness stolen by an AI porn star.

These AI avatars then promoted the sale of porn on their account.

So why would Lena Li, or someone pretending to be Li, do this? Money? There doesn't appear to be any easily accessible payment link or OnlyFans link. Recognition? Maybe. A group of people creating these fake avatars and using profiles and identities from yesteryear? Perhaps.

What is a bit different from the AI models featured on the ABC article is that Lena Li is using a background and name by a person from, depending on how you slice it, a few decades back.

A possible reason that one of the authors of the ABC piece, Michael Workman, floated up to Mothership was the possibility that this was the work of a hobbyist, or someone who was looking to build an audience first before enacting fees.

Whatever the reason is, I can't help but think of the answer Li Ling Ling gave in that Autobabes interview back in 2015 on what theme she was drawn to the most.

The Succubus.

In various character wikis about their powers, they are described as immortal beings that feed on the sexual desires of young men.

To cater to these sexual desires even as the years go by, they can change forms to adopt a more pleasing avatar.

For the sake of thoroughness, I also added another ability that I found to be quite relevant.

Other Investigates

Image from Li's Instagram