The encyclopedia · Advertising & PR · Marketing decision · 2024
A top Chinese livestreamer sold a 'Hong Kong' mooncake that Hong Kong couldn't buy
小杨哥's firm Three Sheep sold a mooncake as a Hong Kong brand with no Hong Kong stores. Regulators called it misleading, fined it ¥68.9M and suspended it.
Three Sheep · 2024-09
What happened
疯狂小杨哥 (Crazy Little Brother Yang, known as 小杨哥) is one of China's biggest livestreamers, with tens of millions of followers on Douyin. His company, Hefei Three Sheep Network Technology (合肥三只羊网络科技有限公司), sells products through his livestreams. In September 2024, ahead of the Mid-Autumn Festival, it promoted a mooncake brand called '香港美诚' (Hong Kong Meicheng), marketing it as a Hong Kong product.
Consumers and reporters noticed that the 'Hong Kong' mooncake could not be bought in Hong Kong. The brand's own customer service said it had marketing and production bases in Guangzhou and Foshan and no offline stores in Hong Kong at all. The 'Hong Kong' branding was a marketing story, not a fact — 'the Hong Kong mooncake you cannot buy in Hong Kong' became a national joke, and then a regulatory case.
On 26 September 2024 the Hefei Market Supervision Administration ruled that Three Sheep's livestream promotion of the mooncake was false and misleading commercial promotion. It confiscated the company's illegal gains and imposed a fine totalling ¥68.95 million (6,894.91万元), and ordered Three Sheep to suspend operations and rectify. The company paid in full and, under the consumer-law 'refund one, compensate three' standard, paid about ¥27.78 million in compensation — roughly ¥96.73 million in all.
Why it happened
- The 'Hong Kong' label was the selling point — it let a mainland mooncake borrow the prestige and price premium of a Hong Kong brand without being one.
- Livestream commerce sells on trust and speed: a host's claim becomes a purchase in seconds, before any viewer can check whether the story is true.
- Three Sheep had built its business on 小杨哥's personal credibility, so a misleading claim was not a small vendor's slip but a bet of the whole platform's reputation.
- Regulators were already tightening livestream-commerce rules, so the case became an example — the penalty was large because the channel was large.
The lesson
Reach turns a claim into a sale before anyone can check it. 'Hong Kong brand' sold the mooncake; that Hong Kong had never heard of it was the one thing viewers could not verify in time.
Aftermath
Three Sheep paid the penalty in full by October 2024 and went quiet. 小杨哥's accounts stopped broadcasting for about 198 days, and he lost more than 10 million followers. On 23 March 2025 a Hefei joint investigation group said the company had paid fines and compensation totalling ¥96.73 million and met the conditions to resume operations. The case became a reference point in China's crackdown on misleading livestream promotion: the bigger the audience a host commands, the larger the bill when the story they sell turns out to be false.
Sources
- China.com: '三只羊'复业代价：罚了6894万 赔了2777万 (penalty, violation wording, figures)
- Jiemian: 时隔近一年'三只羊'复播，此前被罚款、退赔损失9672.8万元 (resumption, total cost)
- iFeng Finance: 停播近200天，罚款赔付9673万 (198-day stop, 10M+ followers lost)
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