SEVEN suspects involved in illegal fundraising through an app that provided a platform for users to find personal fitness trainers were arrested Sept. 30, the Daily Sunshine reported.

The suspects were from Guangzhou-based company Elephant Technology.

The app, Health Mall, was launched in March 2015 and served as a platform where retired professional athletes and graduates of sports colleges could register as personal fitness trainers and sell courses.

Similar to a car-hailing app, the platform connected users with registered personal trainers and charged service fees.

Health Mall provided subsidies to registered trainers based on the number of students they solicited in addition to the fees paid by users for personal training courses.

Also, personal trainers could get another subsidy for recommending others to register as trainers on the platform.

Many registered personal trainers took advantage of the subsidy policy and invested a lot of money to buy their own courses with fake user accounts, which led them to fall victim to the scam.

One of the victims going by the alias Tang Liang in Longgang District said he registered on the platform on his friend’s recommendation. Tang is neither a professional athlete nor a sports college graduate.

Tang purchased a personal trainer account from a shop on Taobao.com for 500 yuan (US$72). Tang did not teach any courses, but he earned money by purchasing the courses under his name with fake user accounts. By the end of May, Tang had invested 700,000 yuan on the platform. However, he has not been able to withdraw the subsidies since May.

Another victim surnamed Yang said she used her younger brother’s identity to register as a personal trainer on the app. Yang’s younger brother is a student at a sports college. Yang and her family members invested a total of 1.18 million yuan to buy courses from the fake personal trainer account for the subsidies.

According to Tang and Yang, most of the registered personal trainers were college students. When the platform said it would cease functioning three months ago, all of the investments were frozen.

Yang said she believed the company was aware of the trick, but did not stop them in order to collect their money.

Police have arrested seven suspects and frozen 23 bank accounts and over 2.2 million yuan. (Zhang Qian)