Beijing Police Open a Criminal Case Into Yixin, the Wealth-Management Giant Whose Fixed-Income Products Stopped Paying

Beijing police opened a criminal case on Monday into companies of Yixin, one of China's best-known private wealth-management brands, and took criminal compulsory measures against the group's actual controller — identified in the notice only as Tang — and several other suspects, according to a police announcement relayed by state media.

The notice from Beijing's Chaoyang district police asks investors to report losses through three channels, including an online portal, and marks the point at which a four-month liquidity crisis formally crossed into criminal territory. Yixin stopped honoring redemptions on its fixed-income products in June, and on Monday it declared itself insolvent, as a Caixin report detailed.

The paper also documented the group's apology to customers, an open letter pushed through two of its own apps — and pushed only to clients of the fixed-income products themselves. Customers who did not hold those products could not see the letter at all. An apology to those with the most to lose went out under what was effectively a privacy setting.

On Weibo, news accounts relayed the notice with its three reporting channels, and the reaction carried less shock than resignation. "It somehow lasted this long," wrote one popular commentator. "It bought so many ads back in the day" — a reference to the years when Yixin's brand was close to inescapable in Chinese cities, plastered across elevators, subways and screens on the promise of steady, safe returns.

That promise was the product. Yixin grew out of the peer-to-peer lending boom of the 2010s and, after that industry was shut down, settled into selling "fixed-income" products — trust-like instruments promising regular payouts — to ordinary savers, alongside a large loan-facilitation business. In its Monday statement the company said it would continue to "steadily operate" the loan-facilitation and other licensed businesses while speeding up the recovery of bad debts, as Beijing police confirmed the case on state television.

For the households who bought the products, the day's two announcements point in opposite directions. A criminal case means someone may eventually answer for it; an insolvency declaration means the money may not come back. The police notice ends by asking investors to register their losses through the three channels. What it cannot yet tell them is how much of that money will ever reappear.