China's courts are grappling with how to punish the growing business of artificially inflating views, likes, comments and other engagement to make merchants and products appear more popular than they are.

A February ruling by Yangjiang Intermediate People's Court in Guangdong province upheld a more than five-year prison sentence for an intermediary who arranged more than 2.47 million yuan ($368,000) of fake traffic for Douyin users and merchants. So, when does manipulating digital engagement become a crime?

"Traffic boosting," as the practice is known, has developed into a specialized industry serving China's e-commerce and short-video economy. Intermediaries solicit orders from customers and pass them to teams that use software, mobile phones and large numbers of online accounts to simulate genuine user activity -- similar to "bot farms." Intermediary network In the Yangjiang case, the intermediary was Su Xian, a 29-year-old from Jinan in eastern China's Shandong province. He operated a website called Huole Network, which included a platform where customers could order fake traffic.

Su advertised his services on WeChat, where customers could open accounts, deposit money and place orders. He then passed the orders to traffic-boosting teams, taking a 1% cut.

Su didn't develop the system himself. He rented it for 3,000 yuan a year from someone known online as "95 Network Xiaoqing," who had bought the source code for 150,000 yuan before having technicians encrypt and redeploy it.

The platform had uses beyond fake traffic. About a third of its customers used it to sell memberships for video services including Tencent Video and iQiyi, but the majority used it to inflate metrics on short-video platforms including Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, and Kuaishou.

One of those customers was Ao Huachao, who operated a traffic-boosting studio from a rented apartment in Yangjiang. Police found 1,246 iPhones, 513 microcontrollers, nine switches, 40 optical modems and several computer hosts at the site.

Ao's team used scripts installed on mobile phones to simulate real users and generate likes, views and other engagement on platforms including Douyin and Xiaohongshu. A customer service representative said 1,000 Douyin likes cost 30 yuan to 50 yuan, while Ao said the price of 10,000 likes had fallen from 500 yuan or 600 yuan to just 110 yuan by the time the case broke in 2022. The operation required more than phones and software.

The team obtained accounts and verification codes through SMS platforms, allowing it to large numbers of accounts after existing ones were banned or suspended. It also installed hundreds of broadband connections to obtain different IP addresses. Ao said that connecting every two phones to a separate broadband line helped prevent Douyin from identifying the accounts as belonging to the same operation.

The measures were not enough to evade Douyin's risk-control system. In April 2022, the company reported suspected illegal activity to police in Yangjiang after detecting a large number of accounts engaging in abnormal click fraud.

Douyin said 425 suspected cheating accounts had watched about 80 million livestreams, liked nearly 600 million streams and posted about 70 million comments. Many of the comments were repeated phrases -- such as "ordered," "received, great quality" and "always using this, supporting the streamer" -- despite the accounts having no transaction records for the products being promoted. The company argued that such activity was damaging the platform's market order. Artificially inflated popularity could divert real users toward livestreams that had purchased fake traffic, while pushing genuinely popular content lower in the recommendation system.

Criminal conviction Police launched a crackdown in August 2022. Ultimately, 14 people were involved in the case, including Su, Ao and several people who handled orders or operated the traffic-generating businesses.

Prosecutors charged Su and others with illegal business operations. Article 225 of China's Criminal Law covers a range of unauthorized commercial activities and includes a catch-all provision for "other illegal business operations that seriously disrupt market order." The prosecution argued that Su had provided paid services to manufacture likes, comments and other engagement without the necessary internet information-service qualifications. By August 2022, he had paid more than 2.47 million yuan to Ao's group and earned more than 20,000 yuan himself.

The prosecution's case relied in part on a judicial interpretation concerning online information services. Under the interpretation, knowingly providing paid information dissemination services for false information can constitute illegal business operations when the activity reaches specified thresholds. But is fake traffic "false information" in the sense intended by criminal law?

Su's defense argued that it was not. A like, view or collection, they said, was a way of changing how information was presented rather than information itself. Su had, in fact, deliberately avoided offering comment services because he believed they could potentially constitute paid information dissemination, the defense said.

The defense argued that a person who artificially increases the number of likes on a post has not necessarily disseminated any false information, particularly where there is no evidence that the underlying content contains rumors or other false claims.

The defense also disputed the prosecution's description of Su, saying he was neither Ao's superior nor a member of a gang, merely an intermediary and that his involvement began in 2021, rather than 2020 as prosecutors alleged.

The trial court made several changes to the prosecution's description of his activities including moving the starting date to 2021 and removing livestreaming rooms from the relevant orders.

Nevertheless, the court concluded that the activity amounted to paid dissemination of fictitious information. It said the operators used batch-manipulation software to interfere with the presentation of information on Douyin, and therefore fell within the scope of illegal business operations.

The court also accepted two statements from Douyin as evidence. The company said merchants using black-market services could artificially inflate their popularity and divert organic traffic, preventing higher-quality content from being properly recommended. That, Douyin argued, could create a cycle in which merchants focused increasingly on buying fake numbers rather than improving their livestreaming operations.

In October 2025, Jiangcheng District Court sentenced Su to five years and two months in prison and fined him 100,000 yuan. Nine other defendants were also convicted.

Six defendants, including Su, appealed. The case then took another turn when a prosecutor appearing before Yangjiang Intermediate People's Court argued that the conduct should instead be considered false advertising. The argument was based on the effect of fake likes and comments on consumers. By creating the appearance that a product or brand had attracted widespread approval, the prosecutor said, the operators could influence purchasing decisions and mislead consumers.

The criminal offence of false advertising applies to false claims about specific goods or services. The prosecutor said Su's illegal gains exceeded 100,000 yuan, which would meet the relevant threshold for prosecution.

During his appeal, Su, while denying the illegal business operations charge, agreed his conduct constituted false advertising and that he was willing to plead guilty to that offense.

But the appeals court rejected the argument. It found that the evidence did not establish Su's illegal gains at more than 100,000 yuan, leaving the first-instance figure of more than 20,000 yuan intact. More importantly, it said the group's activities went beyond promoting particular products.

The operators had massively boosted traffic for large numbers of Douyin users, merchants and livestreams, the court said. Their activities disrupted the online information-service market and the fair competition underlying the platform's algorithm. False advertising therefore could not fully capture the social harm caused by the operation, in the court's view. The court upheld the conviction for illegal business operations on Feb. 25, 2026. However, similar cases have ended in false advertising charges.

Differing judgements Yang Mousong operated an online platform that resold fake likes, comments and reposts to users on platforms including Weibo and Douyin. From 2019 to November 2023, transactions through the platform exceeded 10.3 million yuan and Yang earned more than 1.71 million yuan. He and two employees were initially charged with illegal business operations. But the charges were later changed to false advertising. The court considered likes, reposts, comments, views and follower counts as core indicators by which the public assesses influence, credibility and product popularity, and therefore found that fabricating those metrics created false popularity and an inflated commercial reputation.

In April 2026, a court in Jiangxi province sentenced Yang to one year and nine months in prison and fined him 100,000 yuan.

The contrasting cases illustrate the difficulty of fitting a rapidly evolving online industry into existing criminal law. The underlying conduct is similar but the legal characterization can differ depending on whether the activity is viewed primarily as a disruption of the online information market or as misleading commercial promotion.

Peng Zhiwei, a lawyer at Henan Liangcheng Law Firm who has handled numerous fake-traffic cases, said inflated traffic has existed for years and was previously dealt with mainly through administrative measures or civil claims by internet companies.

More cases have entered the criminal process in recent years as law enforcement standards have changed, he said, adding that combating fake traffic caused by inflated metrics should return to the principle of legality in criminal law, and the application of law should be clarified as soon as possible.

In cracking down on these black and gray market industries, Peng suggested that authorities should pay particular attention to what is actually being manipulated.

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