In a campaign to crack down pornography and illegal activities online in 2015, the police found some suspects faked as celebrities to make a profit when providing prostitution services through Internet platforms.
In early 2015, local police in Shenzhen City were informed that a certain criminal ring was making use of the WeChat app to organize models and actresses for "high-end" prostitution, CNTV.cn reported. In March, the police made a breakthrough when the police raided a sex trade venue and arrested a woman with the ID of a female celebrity.
Chen Shuai, a patrol policeman working for theShenzhen Municipal Public Security Bureau, said their raid also discovered several ID cards of B-list or C-list models and celebrities. For instance, when the investigators searched one of them online, they indeed found hundreds of search results claiming she won certain titles of Miss World pageants. But when they continued probing, the ID proved to be fake.
Those prostitutes all have one thing in common they were pretending to be famous people. Their pimps would pretend to be their managers and make videos and photo shoots for them, then crafted "celebrity CVs" and put them online. Some even made a new virtual celebrity with a fake stage name and fake resumes.
Zhou Kun, another Shenzhen policeman, added that the pimp studios would charge prostitutes 2,000 yuan to 30,000 yuan for making these fake identities. Those websites which published their information would never check these IDs before publish them, because the money was able to buy the websites' cooperation.
Some prostitutes even invested more into their status. They flew to South Korea to have plastic surgery to be more like certain celebrities. When they became "stars," their sex service would be paid better. When arrested, many of them were driving Porsche and Mercedes cars, the police revealed.
At the same time, the pimp ring leaders used online instant message tools to recruit and organize huge groups of prostitutes to do business in the major cities of Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and even abroad with the help of WeChat and Weibo. Some downstream industry businesses, like those agencies promoting the fake resumes of these "celebrities" online, were also established for the criminal chain.
"The online platforms including WeChat app help build the prostitution chain even more easily than traditional organized prostitution, with a wider scope and faster spread of information. Their profits were very huge," said Zhang Xiaopeng, an official working for the Ministry of Public Security.
The Shenzhen ring involved suspects from 28 provinces and municipalities. The police cracked down on it twice last year by means of the national campaign to bring it down. Twenty online prostitution cases have been dealt with and 103 individuals have been detained.
