Su Ning, vice-president of the PBOC, told a working conference on December 14 that imposing regulations on virtual money would ease the risk posed by the virtual currency trade. "The risks could be large," he said. "When money is saved in virtual accounts on websites, it can be used for investments or simply grabbed."

Any potential regulations would cover virtual accounts, transactions and also money, he added.

Besides financial regulators, Internet regulators also have their eyes on the virtual economy.

"Virtual money has been a source of great concern for the government because it reflects a kind of Internet addiction," Tuo Zuhai, deputy director of the Ministry of Culture's market department, which monitors the Internet, was quoted as saying by the Nanfang Daily on December 8.

"It is becoming the focus of our work to look into websites involved in exchanging virtual money into real yuan, in buying and selling virtual items and in hacking into other people's accounts to plunder their reserves," he said in the report.

These remarks were part of the growing debate over the legitimacy of the virtual money.

The issue came to light last month when Yang Tao, a public prosecutor in East China's Jiangxi Province, published an article in the Chinese-language magazine Law and News asking whether virtual Q coins were a threat to the yuan.

More than 22.4 million people use Tencent's QQ messaging service, and the Q coin is widely regarded as a more convenient currency for paying for online services than the RMB.

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