A super large pyramid-selling case, which was filed on Oct 10, 2014 and listed by the Economic Investigation Bureau of the Ministry of Public Security of China as No 1 case in 2015, was cracked, and more than 10 senior management personnel of the pyramid-selling activity including a Malaysian suspect surnamed Chen (alias), the main organizer the activity, were captured with the freezing of the case-involved funds at over 26 million yuan (US$4.19 million) and confiscation of such criminal tools as large numbers of bank cards and USB plug-ins for online bank payment as well as notebook computers, according to the Public Security Bureau of Lianyungang City on May 10.
In September 2014, UFUN Group, a foreign pyramid-selling organization, engaged in criminal activities of pyramid-sales in Lianyungang of Jiangsu province by allowing some netizens to buy “U coins”, a kind of virtual currency issued by UFUN Group, for U-coin membership under the name of “U coin” investment and tempting them to widely develop the “U coin” memberships.
After the police’s preliminary investigation, the organization has developed hundreds of members in Lianyungang. More than 36,000 “U coin” members in 31 provinces (municipalities directly under the central government and autonomous regions) throughout China are involved in the case with a criminal value of over 500 million yuan (US$806 million), according to sources.
As Chen escaped from China to other countries, the police responsible for this case investigated Chen’s contact persons in China and places where Chen once stayed when in China. After the police got the information that Chen would enter China by holding a passport with a changed passport number at Shenzhen Baoan Airport of China on Apr 23, 2015, he was captured on the scene by the police.
