Social platforms popular with younger users, including Xiaohongshu, Taobao, and Xianyu, are being inundated with posts and ads that quietly funnel ordinary people into cryptocurrency trading schemes, through glossy lifestyle posts, paid tutorials, and promises of easy riches, a Beijing Business Daily investigation has found.
The details on the trend
The newspaper said its reporter spent nearly a month posing as an ordinary user and tracking how the traffic is redirected from friendly-looking posts into trading ecosystems.
Accounts build personas from “working girls” to stay-at-home moms and Gen-Z newcomers to seed topics such as “turn 5,000 into 1 million” and then invite followers into private communities, paid tutorials or overseas exchanges via advertising links.
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The investigator described being guided to download an overseas exchange using an overseas Apple ID, investing a few hundred yuan in copy-trading leveraged contracts and suffering steady losses, a process the paper called emblematic of how many people get “harvested.”
Personal information shared
The tactics observed fell into several patterns. Some creators manufacture a credible IP by sharing long personal narratives of losses-then-returns to persuade followers to copy trades.
Others sell step-by-step virtual guides, commonly priced between ¥29.9 and ¥128, that include exchange registration, deposit instructions, and “contract trading” strategies.
Still others post job listings for crypto roles-for example, coin-listing operations or “product director” positions tout seven-figure annual pay while attaching a low-cost paid tutorial as the onboarding step.
Paid advertising links on mainstream platforms claiming exchanges like Binance have “joined” the site were also reported.
Experts and consumer advocates caution that the combination of social proof, aspirational storytelling, and inexpensive purchased products is especially effective at recruiting young or inexperienced investors.
The copy-trading and leveraged contract products peddled in these funnels are high-risk by design; copy traders can lose capital rapidly, and overseas exchanges promoted through such channels may fall outside of domestic consumer protections.
The road ahead
The crypto industry has always been targeted by new types of scams and dangerous practices by people all over the world.
And now this new trend can lead to severe consequences, especially for the youths of the world who have very little knowledge of how scammers work or to the lengths they can go to get what they want.
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