A police operation against the illegal pyramid scam in a residential area in Sichuan Province late Friday turned violent when the proponents of the scheme attacked the raiding policemen.

Local officials of Guangyuan City said the raid was conducted by police officers after they received information that a group of people, believed to be members of an illegal pyramid selling ring, were spotted in the city’s Lizhou District.

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“The police officers wanted to bust the syndicate to put an end to their illegal activities but they were attacked by the members of the ring,” a government official told the official Xinhua News Agency.

The ring members assaulted the police officers and tried to grab the guns and batons from the law enforcers, the official said.

The fracas only ended when one of the police officers managed to fire a warning shot, the official said. One of the assaulters was also injured. The attackers were detained.

Pyramic selling is illegal in China but continues to operate underground, especially in some less developed areas of the country.

Under the scheme, participants are asked to invest money and told to recruit more members in order to get huge returns for their investments. Pyramid selling does not involve real investments or sale of products to the public but merely relies on recruitment.

Last April, a court in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region sentenced 118 people to up to 10 years in jail after they were found guilty of running a pyramid fund raising scam.

The convicts included leaders and senior members of a pyramid ring that managed to gather at least 100 million yuan since 2009. The youngest of the defendants was aged 26 while the oldest was 69.

The 118 people came from Gansu, Shandong, Sichuan, Anhui and Xinjiang.

Tagschina pyramid selling, china pyramic scam