Xianyu Pledges Crackdown After Underage Prostitution Ring Is Exposed on Its Marketplace

A coded phrase that reads, roughly, "virgins available to book" — with some of the girls advertised behind it as young as fourteen — put China's largest second-hand marketplace at the top of the country's trending lists on September 21. Xianyu, the flea-market app operated by e-commerce giant Alibaba, spent the day answering for a sex-trade pipeline that reporters from Hebei Television found operating in plain sight: listings disguised as "model photo shoots," "swimming lessons" and "door-to-door fitness training," each steering buyers off the platform onto WeChat, where a full menu of services waited with prices attached. One customer-service agent even claimed the girls could be "verified at a top-tier hospital."

The report, broadcast by the channel's investigative program, described something more organized than stray bad listings: sellers with fixed scripts, staged photo sets and customer-service channels, moving clients to private chat before any money changed hands. Hebei Television's reporters traced the phrase "chubao keyue" (处宝可约) to sellers offering minors by the hour. Within a day, a Weibo blogger who has been flagging the pattern for months — and says he was reported in retaliation twice — posted a grid of old screenshots as evidence of how long it has persisted.

Xianyu's answer came in a statement published on Weibo and liked more than 44,000 times. The platform said it had set up a special task force, built a workflow of "front-line identification, immediate disposal, police-enterprise coordination," and frozen 98,358 accounts tied to pornographic traffic-diversion since January 2026, passing leads to the police that helped break up fifteen gangs. It said it had reviewed tens of millions of listings, "the overwhelming majority of them ordinary goods," and disputed one detail of the report: the coded phrase, it said, had appeared in a customer-service agent's corporate WeChat profile, not on Xianyu itself. When a reporter searched the phrase on the platform that day, it returned no results.

What the response did not dispute is the mechanism that makes the trade hard to catch. Screenshots circulating on Weibo show how banal the listings look: a pair of "personal earphones, 99% new, delivery in person, city only"; a "test drive, 500 per time, if you're free"; a "Wuhan 211 university student, door-to-door 1v1" — the number standing for one of China's elite universities. The platform's own statement conceded the pattern: gangs use traffic platforms as a storefront, complete the real transaction off-site, and mutate their code words faster than filters can learn them.

The story ran well beyond Weibo. By September 21 it sat third on Baidu's hot-search board, where Xianyu's customer-service apology ranked among the day's top queries, and a Zhihu question worth 2.13 million degrees of heat put the sharper version of the argument: if the platform has already banned 98,000 accounts, why does the trade keep recurring — and can "the transaction happens off our site" work as an excuse? The state-run The Paper carried the full statement.

Moderation failures of this shape are becoming a running story for Chinese platforms: Douyin pulled user-made "suggestive" gifts only last month after the same gap between what sellers post and what moderators see — a story this site covered then. Qianjiang Video's editorial cut to the question regulators will have to answer: a platform should not treat "hard to detect" as a reason for immunity. Xianyu has called for joint action across platforms, and says the police now have its files. The youngest girl in the report was fourteen.