BY posting eye-catching articles featuring untruthful commentaries about P2P lending companies on a WeChat public account, a man going by the alias Liuge, or “Brother Six,” was recently given a jail term of 42 months for blackmailing, the Shenzhen Evening News reported.

The public WeChat account feature has been a key function for posting comments and articles. Some articles discussing heated topics can be reposted tens of millions of times in just a short period of time.

Liuge operated the public WeChat account called “Jinrong Zhaoyaojing,” which literally means “Finance Demon Mirror,” and had accumulated over 18,000 followers.

Liuge used the account to publish unverified negative articles about some P2P platforms.

The negative articles were not only spread on WeChat, but also on other social media platforms, like Tencent’s QQ. The P2P companies that had been targeted by Liuge saw sharp drops in business volume.

In a bid to attract more attention, articles published on Liuge’s account usually had hyperbolic headlines and the content was mostly fabricated. Liuge would ask the P2P companies to pay if they wanted to have the articles deleted.

Liuge usually asked for 20,000 yuan (US$2,912) and forced the companies to sign a year-round service agreement priced at more than 70,000 yuan. Liuge even threatened the companies by saying he would continue to publish negative articles if they didn’t pay him as required.

Since many small companies were not capable of controlling public opinion and were afraid of the ever-growing negative impacts, they would often compromise and pay the operator to delete the articles.

Through the illegal act, Liuge had profited more than 1 million yuan.

(Zhang Qian)