Police arrest 21 at P2P platform accused of $7.6bn scam

Police in China have arrested 21 people at peer-to-peer lender Ezubao who were involved in what state news agency Xinhua claimed was an online scam that had fleeced 900,000 investors of RMB50 billion (US$7.6 billion), Reuters reported. Ding Ning – the chairman of Yucheng Group, which launched Ezubao in July 2014 – was among those arrested. Ezubao’s website has been shut down and it appeared that Yucheng Group’s Beijing office had been closed when reporters visited before the Xinhua report, which described the company as a Ponzi scheme and asserted that more than 95% of the projects hosted on the platform were fake.