A free-egg giveaway fed a national network of password-locked livestreams for the over-55s

Guoke Youxuan (国科优选) ran on a franchise model: more than 5,000 dealers operating in over 600 Chinese cities, each running the same funnel. A storefront offered a free egg for scanning a QR code, which added the shopper to a WeChat group; the group pushed daily invitations to a password-protected livestream that couldn't be replayed and whose link only worked once, and access was gated to people 55 and older.

Inside the livestream, the company sold probiotics and goat milk — both ordinary foods with no medical registration — while claiming they could suppress H. pylori infection and cited five unnamed 'authoritative institutions' to back a claim that the products could stand in for medication. Splitting the sales pitch (livestream, no replay, password-locked) from the physical product this cleanly made the false claims almost impossible for a regulator or a family member to catch after the fact — there was no ad, no listing and no recording to point to.

CCTV News investigated and exposed the network in September 2025. A Baoshan district, Shanghai franchise location was fined ¥20,000 for running 18 fraudulent livestreams on ¥6,720 of sales — a token penalty next to the operation's national scale, but a public record of what the format was built to do.