Major crackdown on illegal fundraising

Public security authorities from 2018 to the first quarter of 2019 filed nearly 19,000 illegal fundraising cases involving 410 billion yuan ($60 billion), the Ministry of Public Security said Friday.

They have destroyed over 200 cross-regional criminal networks and cracked down on more than 400 peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms suspected of illegal fundraising, according to the ministry.

Gao Feng, director of the ministry's Economic Crime Investigation Bureau, said that illegal fundraising and related economic crimes remain relatively serious issues, with the total number of crimes quite large.

Cases involving over 10 billion yuan and more than 1 million investors are frequent, Gao said. "The spread of illegal economic crimes such as illegal fundraising is also pretty fast."

Emerging fields including online lending, investment, pension services, consumer rebates, financial mutual aid, and virtual currencies have become "disaster areas" for economic crimes, said Gao.

Since the collapse of P2P online lending platforms from last June, public security authorities have investigated and handled more than 400 illegal fundraising platforms and arrested more than 60 fugitives from 16 countries and regions.

"To grab excessive profits, the criminals keeps renovating and upgrading their criminal means, which are usually strongly deceptive," he said. "Investors should abandon flukes and be very cautious when investing."