According to CoinDesk news on April 25, as reported by the web3 Radar public account, recently the Procuratorate of Zengdu District handled a case involving exchanging U coins to assist in internet crime activities. After the procuratorate filed a public prosecution, the court sentenced Ai to eleven months in prison and fined him; Fang was sentenced to ten months in prison and fined.
In September 2024, upstream scammer Yang (pseudonym) actively added victim Liu as a friend on QQ. In the chat, Yang deliberately created the impression that he was a successful person engaged in investment and financial management, and hinted that he had insider information that could guarantee profit. He then expressed that he was an internal employee and could not operate conveniently, asking Liu for help. After Liu agreed, Yang provided the investment website, account, and password to Liu, who then helped Yang invest at fixed times under Yang's 'guidance'.
"The website has different products and price fluctuation charts similar to stocks and funds, looking just like a real investment site. After every investment, I saw very high returns in his account." Liu was ultimately tempted and asked Yang to take him to invest.
With Yang's 'help', Liu registered an account. However, investing on the website required the use of virtual currency USDT (Tether, abbreviated as U coin), so Liu also, at Yang's suggestion, exchanged cash for U coins with 'U merchants'. Before each exchange, Liu would prepare cash in advance and hand it over to the 'U merchants' offline, which would increase the amount in Liu's investment account. Initially, he only invested 100,000 yuan, but seeing his account's earnings grow, within just 8 days, Liu 'recharged' the website with 1.1 million yuan through cash withdrawals and exchanges for U coins. When Liu prepared to withdraw cash, he found that the money in the investment website account could not be withdrawn at all, and only then did Liu realize he had been scammed, prompting him to report to the police. After investigation, it was found that the website Liu invested in was not a legitimate investment site, and the money in Liu's account was actually a string of numbers that could be manipulated at will by upstream scammers.
After Liu reported to the police, the 'U merchants' Ai, Fang, and Wang (handled in a separate case) who exchanged U coins offline with Liu surfaced. It turned out that Ai and Fang were not real 'U merchants', but rather 'runners' hired by the upstream scammers. In August 2024, Fang used an overseas anonymous chat software to meet his contact 'Fatty' and others, becoming a 'runner', and invited his fellow townsmen Ai and Wang to form a team specifically to exchange U coins for profit with the upstream. Ai invested 100,000 yuan, and the three first bought U coins worth 100,000 yuan on a virtual currency trading platform. After receiving orders from the upstream, they went to a designated location, paid the U coins from their accounts to the upstream, and then took the cash from the person needing to exchange U coins, completing the exchange in one go.
In the aforementioned case, one of Liu's exchanges of U coins was through Fang and others. In fact, during the exchange process, Liu would not actually receive U coins of equal value; what he received were just numbers manipulated by upstream scammers in a false investment account. As 'runners', Fang and others transferred their U coins to the upstream, received cash, and continued to buy U coins for future use. By exchanging U coins for RMB, they operated across multiple provinces and cities, helping upstream scammers obtain scam funds. For each U coin exchanged, the upstream would pay Fang and others a fee of 0.2-0.6 yuan.
"Later, during the process of exchanging U coins, I found that the U coins I helped clients exchange never reached the clients but were taken by the upstream. I realized the clients had been scammed, and after doing a few more transactions, I heard that some 'runners' were caught, so we cleared our phones..." In November 2024, Fang and Ai were arrested, and Fang truthfully confessed. It was found that in just over a month, Fang, Ai, and Wang transferred nearly 500,000 U coins and illegally profited 180,000 yuan. In February 2025, after the police investigation concluded, Fang and Ai were sent to the Procuratorate of Zengdu District for prosecution review.
After review, the procuratorate believed that the two knew others were committing crimes using information networks and still provided assistance for the crime, which was serious enough to be held criminally responsible for assisting in internet crime activities. In March 2025, the procuratorate sent Fang and Ai to the court for prosecution. On April 8, the court made the aforementioned judgment.