Did British teen really give English names to over 240,000 Chinese babies?

She reportedly made a small fortune by helping to give babies of Chinese families more appropriate English names to save them from a lifetime of embarrassment.

But now the 16-year-old British girl is facing a number of burning questions from the media on how she managed to chalk up the tidy income.

Beau Jessup, who provided the unique online service on her website SpecialName.cn, reportedly made ￡48,000 (about S$86,000) accordingly to the BBC and other British media.

But BuzzFeed News raised some issues after making its own checks.

It asked: Why is her company using stock images, meant for online sale, to depict their staff?

The news site also found that many photos of babies the website claimed to have named appear to be have been lifted from Google image searches.

"Multiple photos from the section appear in the image results for the search term "Asian babies," it reported in an article.

Another question that came up: Why is the domain name registered by an employee of bigredbus-english.cn - a site that helps educate Chinese kids on English culture?

And it happened to be owned by The Great British Teddy Bear Company, whose chief executive happens to be Jessup's dad.

Responding to Buzzfeed questions, Special Name's public relations representative Up Communications explained that stock images were used as Jessup had designed the website herself, and that she was only a teenager.

The PR company also said that one needs a Chinese bank account in order to register a Chinese website. And since the teen didn't have one, the family asked a friend and an employee to help host the site.

When Shanghaiist news website made a check on Sept 8, SpecialName.cn claimed to have named 234,927 babies. Barely two weeks later, the figure went up to 241,013.

Now this begs the question: If the site was first registered in February 2015, that would mean that Jessup as well as her employees would have had to name around 400 babies every single day. Is that even possible?

Since she charges only 68 RMB per baby name, she could have made a fortune of over 16 million RMB or ￡1.8 million (S$3.18 million), Shanghaiist reckoned, after doing the math.

Instead, she only managed to earn a small fraction of the projected sum from her business, which aims to help Chinese parents give alternative names in English so that their kids could have a good headstart should they decide to study or work in UK when they grow up.

Maybe, Jessup should speak up to clarify.

Related: British teen earns over $86,000 giving English names to Chinese babies

chenj@sph.com.sg