Recently, the well-known mainland Chinese gold institution Everlasting Gold (full name Zhejiang Everlasting Holdings Co., Ltd.) has been exposed for financial fraud, resulting in tens of billions of dollars of funds from tens of thousands of people being lost to no avail. Currently, the company has vanished into thin air, with investors revealing that the boss has absconded to the United States.
According to data, the company is a renowned comprehensive gold industry service provider in China, established in 2014 with Wang Guohai as the legal representative. The registered capital of the company is 112 million yuan. It is a member unit of the China Gold Association, a collaborative unit of the Shanghai Gold Exchange, an outstanding financial enterprise in Zhejiang Province, and a model enterprise for customer satisfaction of the China Gold Trading Association. The company’s business spans across provinces such as Zhejiang, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Fujian, as well as regions including Hong Kong and Macau. It has more than fifty gold sales outlets across mainland China.
On May 20th, investors discovered that whether it was refund requests or gold withdrawal applications on the online gold mall, they were all in a “pending review” status. This news spread rapidly, and by May 26th, the mall’s products were cleared out, and the customer service hotline was turned off. Subsequently, investors from Hangzhou, Zhejiang, flocked to police stations in Gongshu District and Shangcheng District to report the case and register on-site.
Investor Li Cheng (pseudonym) from Guangdong revealed to Epoch Times that currently, most of those reporting the case are investors from the Zhejiang region, with the main investors concentrated in the Zhejiang area.
Li Cheng was recommended the online mall by a friend who worked as a salesperson at Everlasting Gold store. He had also purchased gold from the store himself. With his friend working at the store for over a year and his own six months of investment, he had a lot of trust in it. However, Li Cheng never expected that after purchasing 30,000 yuan worth of gold on May 14th, Everlasting Gold would collapse a week later. He is now too afraid to tell his family and considers himself unlucky.
Li Cheng told the reporter that his friend is now unemployed, and the money they invested is lost.
“At the beginning, it was enticing its employees to invest, and then it spread among them. My friend invested around 150,000 yuan, her husband 50,000 yuan, mother-in-law 50,000 yuan, and herself 50,000 yuan,” Li Cheng said. He now hesitates to report the case himself and finds it difficult to go to Zhejiang to do so.
It is understood that Everlasting Gold’s trading business is divided into online and offline modes, in which investors do not physically hold the gold but operate in a gold custody model.
Li Cheng expressed that the online mall operates similarly to electronic trading platforms, where investors buy items with different maturity dates and are provided with a certain interest rate. The offline mode is contract-based. “It’s a system where you only profit without loss. In the offline mode, someone investing 10 million yuan, for example, would receive 8% or 9% interest after a certain number of days. Of course, you could also redeem it for physical gold. However, very few actually convert this [investment] into physical gold since storing it is inconvenient, hence it remains in contract form.”
Regardless of the operation on the gold mall platform, be it when gold prices rise or fall, investors almost always “make profit without loss,” which was also Everlasting Gold’s selling point. Li Cheng revealed that the largest investors were Zhejiang bosses and those affected by relocation, with the amounts being substantial, reaching millions. Preliminary statistics show that nearly 20,000 investors are involved, with the total amount estimated conservatively at 4-5 billion yuan.
According to a report by the “Economic Daily News,” some investors and their families have collectively invested 12.3 million yuan in gold financial products, with the highest single investment at 4.4 million yuan.
A user on Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) who claims to have invested 20 million yuan in Everlasting Gold over the past decade, stated that this money is a combined asset from over ten family members in multiple generations, primarily from older family members who served as wartime translators and parents who were doctors at top tier hospitals in the 1960s. The user mentioned that due to the long investment period, trust gradually developed, leading to larger investment amounts.
An online blogger known as “Fancai Bureau” dissected the Everlasting Gold scam. In the article, he described how Everlasting Gold built trust using physical stores and fake gold, relying on a pyramid scheme to recruit individuals for over a decade, before ultimately fleeing with the money with precision, turning the Ponzi scheme into a textbook “slip out of the shell” operation.
For the first three years, Everlasting Gold used a portion of the money to genuinely buy gold, with clients receiving cash promptly upon maturity, garnering trust through annualized 9% returns. The storefront was genuine gold, while the warehouse contained brass, and the bank’s gold was photoshopped.
During the following four years, they shifted money around, increasing the scam. New clients’ principal funds were directly used to pay off old clients’ interest. By relying on a pyramid-style recruitment, downlines were given a 29% commission (receive 290,000 yuan for a 1 million yuan investment). Employees also recruited their relatives and neighbors to invest, some even staking their entire savings.
The last three years were about stalling and secretly transferring funds. Money was laundered in secret, transferred to hundreds of shell companies (jewelry, e-commerce, supply chains), requiring franchisees to clear their daily revenues to offset interest holes. Top executives bought overseas properties early, falsified gold policies (claimed 4.1 billion, actually paid 4000 yuan in premiums). With the recent exposure of Everlasting Gold’s fraud, boss Wang Guohai has already fled to the United States on a private jet, timing his escape perfectly.
“Fancai Bureau” claimed that Everlasting Gold had been a super invincible scam dormant for a decade, leaving him “dumbfounded.”
Li Cheng also mentioned that to his knowledge, the Everlasting Gold boss had two futures accounts opened, “one domestically and one overseas. Then, he shorted domestically using investors’ money, while going long overseas. Money was made in the overseas account while losses incurred domestically, effectively washing it away.”
When contacted, the Economic Investigation Department in Ningbo, Zhejiang, responsible for the case, could not be reached.