Recently, the police in Ya’an, Sichuan Province, disclosed a case of fake academic journals, where a criminal group used the names of university journals to deceive individuals in need of academic qualifications or promotion into paying high fees for publishing space, totaling an illegal income of 26 million Chinese yuan, with victims scattered across various regions in the country.
According to a report by Upstream News, in March 2023, Guo, a medical worker in Ya’an, urgently needed to publish a medical paper for a promotion application. He naively believed someone who claimed to have an internal “fast track” for publication and transferred 16,500 yuan to them. Shortly after, Guo received a medical academic journal with his paper printed in it. However, when he submitted this journal for his promotion application, the system flagged it as a “fake paper.”
Realizing he had been deceived, Guo contacted the editorial department of the journal and learned that the journal he received was forged, and they had never published his paper. In April 2024, Guo reported the case to the local police.
The police announcement revealed that the majority of the papers sent to Guo in the journal were fake. The suspects were suspected of illegally printing fake journals without publishing permits to swindle high “publishing fees.”
In June 2024, 13 suspects led by Wu were arrested, with over 9,000 fake journals seized on the spot and more than 23 million yuan involved in the case confiscated.
According to reports, the group had established a complete black production chain of soliciting customers for fees, forging papers, printing fake journals, and distributing them.
Since February 2021, the group had been operating illegally by collecting fees ranging from thousands to tens of thousands of yuan from “authors” in need of academic qualifications or promotion through developing lower-level agents. Without authorization, they would edit and typeset the received “papers,” then impersonate the entire signage of the magazine publisher to illegally produce and distribute fake academic journals. These journals were then either sent by courier to lower-level agents or directly to the “authors.”
Although Wu had a cultural company registered under his name, it had no publishing or distribution qualifications. On December 15, 2021, Wu, under his company’s name, signed an agreement with a university journal magazine solely for collecting and organizing content from a certain conference, explicitly excluding publishing and distribution operations.
From February 2021 until the case was exposed in 2024, the group had illegally earned 28.371 million yuan, with a net illegal income of 26.05 million yuan after deducting unpaid amounts and operational costs, affecting numerous victims across the country.
On December 19, 2025, the court issued a first-instance judgment on the case. The main offender, Wu, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for the crime of illegal business operations, with a three and a half year probation period and a fine. The other 12 members also received corresponding legal penalties, but specific details were not provided.