"China's richest Bitcoiner" Li Xiaolai suffered an unexpected disaster: He was "arrested in Beijing" without any evidence

Summary: According to online rumors, Li Xiaolai was arrested in Beijing for allegedly illegally raising funds in disguised form through tools such as Bitcoin, involving a total amount of 2 billion yuan. Later, Li Xiaolai refuted the rumor in his WeChat Moments, calling it a "rumor." Earlier that day, CCTV said that multiple Chinese departments will join forces to crack down on the black industry chain, and there are more than 3,000 token and virtual currency pyramid schemes.

As multiple departments in China join forces to crack down on the black industry of blockchain concept, Li Xiaolai, who claims to be "China's richest Bitcoin man", has been accused of fake news.

On Monday, January 15, Beijing time, news of Li Xiaolai being arrested in Beijing spread online. As shown in the following screenshot, according to rumors, the Beijing police Weibo account "Beijing Ping An" posted a Weibo at 19:15 on the same day, saying

"Li Xiaolai, the actual controller of the virtual currency trading website Bigone, was arrested in Beijing on suspicion of illegally raising funds in disguised form through tools such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, with the amount involved reaching 2 billion yuan."

However, Wall Street Journal checked the Weibo post released by "Beijing Ping An" and found that the content in the screenshot did not appear around 7 p.m. on the 15th.

Afterwards, Li Xiaolai himself also posted the word "rumor" on his WeChat Moments to refute the rumor and respond to the above online news. The following screenshot of Li Xiaolai's WeChat Moments comes from Sun Cheng, the all-weather technology writer of Wall Street Journal.

Li Xiaolai once announced to the media that his Bitcoin assets were "six figures". Before China stopped ICO token financing, he had participated in some ICO projects. The Wall Street Journal's all-weather technology article "Once ICO is banned, who else will be hurt besides Xue Manzi and Li Xiaolai?" used the following table to show some of the projects he participated in.

The online news on the 15th of this month made Li Xiaolai bear the unwarranted stigma of being arrested for disguised illegal fundraising. It also reflects from one aspect the recent strict regulatory situation of the Chinese government to crack down on illegal activities using tokens, virtual currencies and other means.

On the afternoon of the 15th, according to CCTV reports, the Ministry of Public Security, the Supreme People's Procuratorate, the Supreme People's Court, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the People's Bank of China and other departments announced that they will adopt a joint governance model, work with more government departments and enterprises, increase efforts to combat the online black industry chain, and jointly build a "cybersecurity community."

The report quoted Li Xuyang, head of Tencent Security Anti-Fraud Lab, as saying that they had discovered more than 2,000 types of tokens that had been created using the so-called blockchain concept, and that there were more than 3,000 pyramid schemes. This type of crime was very serious and involved huge amounts of money, and was extremely harmful.

Also on the 15th, Bloomberg reported that the Chinese government plans to block all domestic access to "self-made and offshore centralized trading platforms" and will also take targeted measures against individuals and companies that provide market making, settlement and clearing services in centralized trading.

A subsequent article in Wall Street Journal mentioned that in September last year, after the central bank severely stopped ICO financing, China completely shut down all domestic Bitcoin exchanges. RMB-denominated transactions shrank significantly, but 77% of computing power was still within China.

The article stated that Bitcoin speculators in China have turned to over-the-counter P2P (person-to-person) transactions, but some people still set up their own platforms or rely on existing platforms and corporate entities overseas to provide market making and settlement services.