A news snippet about a con caught my eye last week. A Hangzhou court handed a life term to Cai Jincong for conning 1,200 investors.

His modus operandi was predictable: hard-sell a fashionable scheme, promise high returns (20 percent), raise money, disappear.

His firm, Zhejiang Yinfang Investment and Management Co, raised as much as 200 million yuan ($30 million) illegally. Cai spirited away 88 million yuan, peddling, well, investment products in the name of a peer-to-peer or P2P lending scheme.