(ECNS) -- Big data has been added to Beijing's financial supervision agencies to crack down on illegal fundraising, with an online pre-warning platform already finding 35 high-risk companies.
"We collect about 200 data features that have emerged on the Internet from financial institutions, finance products, P2P products and private funding," said Li Chonggang, a senior manager at the technology company that provided the pre-warning platform.
Through data mining the companies' information, the platform analyzes various components such as regularity, key word hits, communicativeness, profit and complaint rates to calculate the risk of illegal fundraising posed by each company.
Current illegal fund raising risks are focused in three areas, namely business fraud, credibility, and mobility, which can be quantified via the platform.
In addition to data from social networks, the platform also analyzes official data from Beijing authorities. It has reviewed about 470 million news articles, nearly 16 billion Weibo posts, 220 million forum posts, as well as 56 million WeChat messages.
Beijing authorities took up 89 new illegal fund raising cases, involving 21,000 individual investors and 17.26 billion yuan ($2.78 billion) of investments. From January to May 2015, another 51 cases emerged involving 3.3 billion yuan, a 65 percent increase from the same period in 2014.
