A man in China who operated 4,600 phones to inflate live-stream viewer counts, making 3 million yuan (US$415,000) in less than four months, has been jailed.
His imprisonment marks the first time that Zhejiang province in eastern China – the hub of the Chinese live-streaming industry – has punished anyone in the business for fraud.
The individual, surnamed Wang, was sentenced to one year and three months in prison and fined 50,000 yuan (US$7,000) for the “crime of illegal business operations”.
Wang began operating the business in late 2022 when a friend told him about a “lucrative” practice known as “brushing”.
The term refers to faking real-time activities such as viewer counts, likes, comments and shares in live-streaming to simulate genuine viewer interactions and mislead consumers.
TikTok was one of his main sources of clients, as shown in photos disclosed by the Ningbo Evening News.
Setting up a brushing business is quite straightforward.
Wang bought 4,600 mobile phones controlled by specialised cloud software.
He also bought VPN services and network equipment, such as routers and switches, from a tech company based in Changsha in central China’s Hunan province.
With just a few clicks on his computer, Wang could operate all the mobile phones to simultaneously flood into a live-streaming target to inflate viewer counts and interactions.
“The cost of using one of the mobile phones is 6.65 yuan (less than US$1) per day,” Wang said.
He explained that the final fee for the service would depend on the amount of time each phone stayed connected to a live-streaming event and the number of mobile phones activated.
Up to March last year, he made about three million yuan (US$415,000) by selling the service to live-streamers seeking to boost their online performance.
The fake viewer accounts were bought in bulk from others, according to Wang.
The accounts would sometimes be censored for failing real-name authentications, but the re-registration process was simple.
“There are certain loopholes in the account management of the live-streaming platform,” the prosecutor in charge of the case told Ningbo Evening News.
He also said it was not known where the mobile phones were bought, but there was a “possibility of illegal activities in the mobile phone recycling market”.
In addition to Wang, 17 other suspects are under investigation for “breaking national regulations, knowingly spreading fake information online through publishing services for profit, and disrupting the market order”, according to local prosecuting authorities.
Traffic fraud has long been a problem on mainland live-streaming platforms and e-commerce websites, igniting public calls for regulation.
“This is clearly not an isolated case, ” one online observer said.
