Media reports show that WeChat, China's most popular messaging app, is becoming a new platform for pyramid-selling schemes.

WeChat is an innovative way of doing e-commerce that can target customers directly, and many businesses believe it has great commercial potential, so do pyramid-selling operators.

Brainwashing and attracting lower-level clients are typical of pyramid-selling, whose operators use get-rich-quick stories to attract lower-level retailers and get money from them without due payback. Many people have heard stories about young people who have made a large fortune overnight through businesses on WeChat, earning 100,000 yuan ($16,120) a month and purchasing an apartment within six months of starting a business on WeChat.

Marketing on WeChat is social marketing and acquaintance marketing in nature, which promotes products to relatives and friends through personal credit and emotional bond. Once pyramid-selling on WeChat spreads, it turns a circle of friends into a platform of fraud, which not only seriously undermines people's daily social life but also endangers social stabilization.

(China Daily 05/27/2015 page8)