Three Months. RMB 4 Million. The Guru Never Existed.

The group had a rule. Post a screenshot of your stock trading and your membership fee is waived.

It sounds like a favour. The course is not cheap, saving a little is worth something, and all you are doing is posting a picture. People did it every day. Nobody thought it was strange.

You think you are handing in homework.

The published case summary from China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate puts it plainly. The operation waived membership fees in exchange for stock trading screenshots in order to establish how much money each investor had.

They were not interested in how well you trade. They wanted to know how much money this group of people would put into one stock at tomorrow’s open.

The man selling to you is the man telling you to buy

Knowing the size of the incoming money is what makes the rest of it work.

In the procuratorate’s own words: after tallying the volume of buy orders from the trading screenshots investors sent in, the “capital operator” entered sell orders at the corresponding price for shares accumulated earlier at low prices, using the call auction matching rules to sell those cheaply acquired shares precisely to the investors who had been lured in, with the proceeds split between Wu and the “capital operator.”

Unpacked, it works like this.

Someone had already quietly accumulated a stock at a low price. The teacher then told the group to buy that stock.

They could calculate how much the group would commit. At the moment of the opening call auction, the other side placed sell orders at exactly that price.

You got your fill. You thought you were buying the stock your teacher recommended.

You were buying his inventory.

The teacher who was going to make you money and the person selling you the shares were splitting the proceeds. You were not his student. You were the buyer he needed.

That is where the RMB 4 million came from. Not tuition. The spread on dumping cheap stock onto you.

Zhao Rongqing was not a person

The teacher in the group was called Zhao Rongqing. He had an assistant called Xia Hong.

Zhao posted market commentary every day, along with links to the livestream lessons and trading suggestions. His following grew. People said his calls were sharp, that he was decent, that he replied quickly.

Zhao Rongqing did not exist.

The group had registered multiple accounts and named them all Zhao Rongqing and Xia Hong. It was not one teacher with many students. It was many people taking turns being one teacher.

The person you spoke to in the morning may not have been the person you spoke to in the afternoon. He replied quickly because he was not one person replying. He seemed endlessly patient because patience was a shift someone was rostered onto.

The causal story here is completely inverted. It is not that a talented man attracted a crowd. A crowd was needed to absorb the stock, so a man was made.

The guru was not discovered. He was registered, in bulk.

A fake teacher is not enough on its own. Someone has to believe him.

So the same people posed as ordinary retail investors in the group chats and the livestream, discussing trades and posting fabricated screenshots of trading profits.

Here is what your first day in the group looked like. The teacher named a stock, people immediately said they were in, a couple of days later someone posted a screenshot of a gain, and someone else asked when it was safe to add to the position.

Those people were not like you. They were part of the same operation.

You thought you were in a crowd. You were the only real investor in the room. Everything else was scenery, including the profit screenshots that made you feel you were missing out.

Social proof is the cheapest way a person has of deciding what is true. If this many people say it works, surely it is not all fake. The mechanism was simply run backwards. Manufacture the crowd first, then wait for the target to reach the conclusion on their own.

Three months, RMB 4 million, 29 people

How long did this run?

June to August 2020. Three months.

The amount defrauded was over RMB 4 million. Roughly speaking, more than RMB 40,000 a day.

Wu planned it with Zhang, whose case was handled separately, and assembled the group. Twenty-nine people were prosecuted.

On 15 November 2022 the Zengcheng District People’s Court in Guangzhou delivered its first-instance judgment. The principal defendant, identified in the published case only by the surname Wu, received 14 years and 6 months and a fine of RMB 500,000. A second defendant was sentenced to 11 years and fined RMB 150,000. The remaining 27 received sentences from 10 years and 6 months down to 9 months. On 26 May 2023 the Guangzhou Intermediate People’s Court rejected the appeal and upheld the judgment.

In October 2023 the Supreme People’s Procuratorate published the case as a model example of financial investment fraud.

One detail is worth holding onto. The operation never held a licence for securities investment advisory business.

It did not need one. It needed a name, a batch of accounts, and people willing to play the part of ordinary investors.

Six years on, the complaints are still rising

Change the setting. This time it is not stock tips but course sales, and the opening stretch is almost identical.

In April 2026 the China Consumers Association and the China Society for Market Regulation issued a joint consumer warning about online personal-finance courses. Disputes have grown steadily since 2020, and complaint tickets rose further after October 2025.

The path has not changed in six years. Only the price tag has been reskinned.

It opens with free lessons, a one-yuan trial, a limited-time offer. Once you are on WeChat and in the group, the script follows. Bank deposits are losing value. Investing changes your life. Guaranteed returns. One-to-one guidance from a famous teacher.

Then comes the real course, from a few thousand to tens of thousands of yuan. Paying does not end it. Next are the private coaching upgrade and the advanced practical module.

Among the people who complain about these courses, older consumers are heavily represented. They have fewer sources of information and less familiarity with financial products, while the script aimed at them is sharper. Protect the value of your savings. Be less of a burden on your children.

One person posted online that their father’s hundred thousand yuan in retirement savings, built up over years, was taken entirely.

There are more convoluted versions. According to press reports, a man in Guangxi wanted a refund on a course he had bought and was told that getting his money back required buying a fund first. He put in RMB 5,000, was then induced into an operating error that froze the account, and was told he had to buy more to unfreeze it. After another payment, the other side cited a drop in his credit score and asked for RMB 45,000.

The road out of the course had been rebuilt so that it only ran forward.

Earlier years produced blunter versions. One former student said the RMB 6,998 course sold as a famous teacher’s class was a recording with no teacher actually teaching, and that her refund was refused on the grounds that one homework assignment had been submitted late.

One founder’s claimed economics degree from a prestigious university turned out to have been earned through night classes. The national financial planner certificate that appears on business cards has long since ceased to be in the state occupational qualification catalogue.

Academics who study the marketing of these courses sum it up as fabricated credentials plus paid commenters, engineered to produce false consensus. Put simply, the people standing next to you are props.

The titles, the degrees, the certificates, the profit screenshots, the agreeing voices in the chat. All of it was built backwards. Decide how much to take from you first, then work out what kind of person you would need to see.

That screenshot

Back to the rule in the group.

Post a trading screenshot and your membership fee is waived.

Now you know what that picture was for. It was not homework. It was a tally of incoming orders. Once you filled it in, they knew what price to sell at and how many lots to put up, and they waited for you to take them.

The membership fee they waived was the only genuine discount in the entire business.

And the only real investor in that group was you.