A private livestream sold elderly viewers 'longevity wine' as a cure — ¥250,000 fine

Ahuan Network Technology (阿换网络科技) built its own website specifically to run private-domain livestreams — broadcasts reached through a link shared in a WeChat group or similar closed channel rather than a public platform's feed, where a regulator or a skeptical stranger might stumble across the pitch. The company hired outside hosts to present two products to an audience skewed toward middle-aged and older viewers: '君仙谷' longevity wine and a ganoderma-spore-oil supplement capsule, both credited on-air with curing disease.

China's advertising and anti-unfair-competition law treats a disease-cure claim as a category its own: unlike a vague wellness claim, it requires evidence the seller can produce on demand. Ahuan's hosts made the claim but, when regulators investigated, the company could not produce anything backing it up — the pitch had outrun any evidence for it from the start.

The private-domain format was itself doing marketing work: a closed WeChat-adjacent channel reads as a trusted circle rather than an open ad, which is part of why regulators had flagged this structure — free samples to build trust, urgency to create anxiety, then an unverifiable cure claim to close the sale — as a recurring pattern in elder-targeted fraud. Suzhou's Gusu district market regulator fined Ahuan ¥250,000 in 2025, one of seven cases the national market regulator named that October as examples of the pattern.