Internet star gets 11 months for false advertising

Liangshan Mengyang, an internet celebrity from Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture, Sichuan province, has been sentenced to 11 months in prison and fined 80,000 yuan ($11,100) for falsely advertising the goods she sold on her livestreams, according to the prefecture’s Zhaojue county people’s court.

Starting from 2018, Liangshan Mengyang, whose real surname is Axi, released a series of short videos online in which she lied about living in poverty, as well as livestreams in which she tearfully lamented the situation.

In the videos, she claimed that her parents had died and that she had to drop out of school to take care of her younger siblings. The videos showed them wearing tattered clothes in a dilapidated adobe house, where she said they only had potatoes to eat.

After gaining a number of followers, she began selling what she said were “local Liangshan” agricultural specialties such as walnuts and xueyan, a natural sticky secretion of plants in the genus Sterculia, via livestreaming. Xueyan can be used as a laxative and as a skin treatment to promote anti-aging.

Her videos gained popularity, and the number of her followers on one short video platform peaked at 3.86 million.

However, some netizens who visited Liangshan Mengyang’s hometown in Zhaojue discovered that her parents were still alive, and her family lived in a government-built house.

Investigations by local police in Zhaojue revealed that her family had long benefited from preferential policies and lived in decent conditions.

Police also found that the goods she sold during her livestreams were not produced in Liangshan.

In May last year, the market supervision administration in Liangshan launched an investigation into internet celebrities, including Liangshan Mengyang, who were selling goods from other regions that they claimed were from Liangshan.

The case was later handed over to public security authorities for further investigation.

As a result of one of those investigations, police found that in March 2021, Liangshan Mengyang signed a contract with a media company based in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan.

The company, owned by a man surnamed Tang, had been cultivating internet celebrities such as Liangshan Mengyang and Liangshan Aze since 2021 by staging fake videos and creating fake online personas.

It purchased agricultural and other products at low prices from wholesale markets in Chengdu, and then used e-commerce platforms and their internet stars to sell them as authentic, eco-friendly Liangshan products. The total sales exceeded 30 million yuan, with the company earning more than 10 million yuan in profit.

Eight people involved in the scheme, including Liangshan Mengyang, have received prison sentences from the Zhaojue county people’s court.

Tang was sentenced to one year and two months in prison and fined 100,000 yuan.

Liangshan Aze, whose real surname is Adi, was sentenced to nine months and fined 40,000 yuan. Another five of the company’s employees were sentenced to between nine months and one year in prison, and fined between 20,000 yuan and 80,000 yuan. All of their illegal gains were confiscated.

Liangshan authorities said 457 holders of self-media accounts were punished last year, and 15 accounts were permanently closed.