On job-seeking websites and social media, an abundance of job ads target the “treasure mothers” demographic, encompassing roles such as fitting models, voice actors, customer service, and clerks. However, upon closer examination, most of these job opportunities are cleverly disguised click-farming schemes—a “bird-catching net” tailor-made to satisfy treasure mothers’ secret desire to earn money without leaving home.
A complete scam typically unfolds in four stages: luring birds, feeding birds, intoxicating birds, and slaughtering birds. It targets full-time treasure mothers who are daunted by the dual burdens of housework and childcare, women who wish to work from home, enjoy flexible working hours, and not be required to work overtime.
These seemingly ideal job opportunities are invariably entangled in the net of scams, proliferating in particular across social networks. It is easy to find videos of individuals holding IDs, hoping to find jobs online without specifying the desired position, salary, or work content, seduced by the mere promise of time freedom. These adverts are often part of a scammer’s meticulous strategy, exploiting treasure mothers’ demand for certain types of work to lure them into the trap.
For instance, click-farming is often disguised as various part-time opportunities, claiming that tasks can be completed anytime, anywhere, with wages settled daily, and the more one works, the more one earns, while specifically emphasizing that treasure mothers are perfectly capable of handling these jobs. Once people engage with these positions, they discover their true nature is click-farming.
In some cases, many treasure mothers born in the 1990s were swept into click-farming scams due to a lack of income after giving birth or attracted by the flexible work hours. Initially, they may receive small rewards such as cash red envelopes for downloading apps or check-in bonuses, which is known as the “feeding birds” stage. Scammers then encourage victims to invest more in click-farming activities once trust is established, moving into the “intoxicating birds” stage. This is followed by the heartbreaking “slaughtering birds” phase, where treasure mothers are deceived out of large sums of money, resulting not only in financial loss but also potentially in family breakdown.
In such scams, fraudsters and extras must collaborate closely, creating a fervent atmosphere of rush-ordering, using tactics like sharing screenshots of successful rebates to create a false scene of profits, continually inducing victims deeper into the scam.
An anti-fraud assistant police officer working in the Shapingba District Bureau of Chongqing infiltrated a suspicious chat group, hoping to expose the fraudulent practices within. Unexpectedly, he found that some group members questioned the security of the extensive personal information required when registering accounts. The officer tried to warn the group members through private messages, indicating that it was a scam and not to download the related app. However, just minutes later, the officer was removed from the group. It was later learned that the group members who had raised security concerns were, in fact, plants from the scamming syndicate.
Treasure mother Wang Xiao noticed during her interactions with a click-farming company that the company would publicly display its business license in groups, which she verified to be authentic and legal. She has a university degree and was quite confident in her worldly wisdom after working for several years in Beijing. When she became pregnant, her salary dropped to 2,000 yuan per month. Postpartum work worsened, facing continuous overtime and long business trips, she ultimately chose to resign. Wang Xiao hoped to share the financial responsibilities of the family with her husband. She recalled that daily living expenses were very limited at that time, and the cost of purchasing ingredients every day was about 30 yuan. Therefore, she was eager to find new job opportunities.
Wang Xiao learned about various tasks in different order-brushing chat groups and gradually let her guard down due to the casual chatting environment in the groups. In one group, the group admin reminded everyone to get off work at 5 pm every day and to clock in at 9 am the next morning, and they could also receive a small red envelope of 2 yuan. This gradual relaxation led her to participate in a task that promised 7000 yuan in return for a 5000 yuan recharge. She followed the instructions in the group, but was informed that she made a mistake and everyone’s funds were unable to be returned. The solution proposed by the scam team was that everyone had to participate in the next task in order to possibly retrieve their previous investment.
Trapped by the hope of recovering her principal, Wang Xiao was led to make more high-stake recharge investments. When an opportunity for high investment and high return was presented, the scammers were actually preparing for the final blow in their fraud. Wang Xiao got in deeper, and as she lost money, she felt the impact on other group members and apologized, expressing a desire to back out, but she was in too deep.
In a similar case, Luohong, a full-time mom from Funing, Yancheng, also felt a heavy responsibility for causing the failure of a group task due to being accused of an operational error, and wanted to make up for it by paying more money. After being deceived, Wang Xiao cried for a long time in front of her husband but was reluctant to reveal the truth. Nevertheless, her husband didn’t ask for details, comforting her in various ways. In the end, Wang Xiao returned to her old job, bearing the consequences alone, saving and using all her salary to repay her debts. She also revealed that her aunt suffered even larger losses, but due to shame, she has not disclosed the details to her to this day.
In the current digital age, scams are rampant, and one type of fraud specifically targets those who crave to change their lives, especially full-time moms. These individuals often long for change because of family responsibilities and seek unnoticed wealth, hoping for financial freedom and respect.
Advertisements like these often depict scenarios where people can earn money through simple smartphone operations, luring them into traps. For example, one ad described how a full-time mom could easily earn four to five thousand yuan a month by spending five minutes each day recording bedtime stories for babies, thereby freeing her from financial pressures at home.
Unfortunately, these ads are often false, and some companies have been fined for creating these false impressions. However, despite fines, they still lure moms like Wang Yuan from Qingyuan, Guangdong, who become bankrupt and fall into the so-called “order-brushing” trap, then hide it from their families for fear of speaking up.
When asked why they didn’t stop when losses escalated, many victims said they hoped to gamble and succeed once, fearing to miss a potential opportunity to get rich. After realizing they’ve been scammed, they often don’t dare to immediately inform their families, instead attempting to remedy the situation to avoid arguments and blame.
According to the statistics of the Ministry of Public Security in 2023, order-brushing and rebate frauds accounted for about one-third of the high-incidence cases, becoming the so-called “King of Tele-Fraud Cases.” It can be seen through cases that the victims are mostly full-time mothers, unemployed individuals, or students.
For those who harbor dreams and hope to improve their living conditions through hard work, such scams are undoubtedly a heavy blow. In their isolated state, they find it hard to resist the well-designed bait of scammers. Like Zhang Wen from Henan, she originally planned to contact a friendly scammer known as “Keke” on the internet. Not only did she lose her principal, but she was also lured into an even bigger trap.
For scammers, they almost fully understand the psychology and circumstances of their victims and calmly exploit the victims’ desire to improve their situations, pressing on step by step until the victim gradually realizes, but by then it’s too late, the scammer has already blocked and deleted the victim.
In the end, victims like Li Lili from Zhengzhou might have invested a large sum of money for the so-called withdrawal tasks, while the road to rights protection seems to be a long way off. In this unpredictable online world, people must always stay vigilant to avoid becoming the next victim.
Li Lili felt uneasy, suspecting it might be a trap, similar to gambling risks, yet in order to retrieve her previous investment of more than 400,000 yuan, she had to invest again. The victims of the scam believe that as long as they complete the last assigned task, all their invested funds will return to their account, and they will be able to return to their once peaceful lives.
A mother from Chengwu County in Heze, Shandong, was duped into recharging 2 million yuan for withdrawals, and she invested all of the 1.25 million yuan she had saved for buying a house. Another mother from Daiyue District in Tai’an suffered a more severe blow than financial loss. In December 2022, unable to bear the defraudment of 100,000 yuan, she attempted suicide. Although she survived, she suffered multiple comminuted fractures. She is the mother of two children, who are in kindergarten and elementary school. Her husband found out what had happened after checking her phone, she couldn’t admit to her family that she had been scammed.
The criminal suspect was later arrested, tried in court, and sentenced to 2 years and 10 months in prison, with a fine of 10,000 yuan, and was ordered to return the victim’s money. However, to pay for the treatment, this family incurred hundreds of thousands of yuan in medical debt. With both sets of elderly parents having multiple health issues, the family fell into financial difficulties. The husband was originally a truck driver, unable to work due to caring for his wife.
Not only order-brushing scams, but fraud targeting stay-at-home mothers is also widespread on online job sites and social media, involving trial model, voice actor, customer service, and clerical positions among others. These are often variants of brushing scams, cunningly designed with opportunities that tug at the mothers’ heartstrings. For instance, those who enjoy photography and pursue beauty are easily tempted by trial model positions. A report mentioned that Mrs. Zhao Mei, while looking after her children, browsed short videos and discovered a trial model job opportunity that seemed to have relaxed conditions, where uploading a buyer show could earn corresponding commissions.
Mothers interested in voice-over work were also caught in scams carefully crafted by swindlers. One case involves Qu Lan from Xiamen, who received a seemingly reasonable part-time job offer and easily passed the voice-over audition after a test. She not only became a voice actress but also received her first payment. However, to take on larger voice-over jobs, she was told she needed to increase her credibility score, which required brushing orders to complete.
Eager for income, mothers like Chen Nian from Sichuan were lured into jobs that involved liking and tipping social media streamers in order to make money. In a continuous cycle of topping up and cashback, she gradually forgot that she originally came to apply for a customer service job. Similarly, housewives with lower educational background and income seeking opportunities to earn money through manual labor are also at risk of being deceived. So-called manual work, such as beading, assembling pen refills, diamond painting, cross-stitch, etc., are essentially another form of brushing order scams, involving tangible items in which the capital is invested.
Many people respond to the recommendations of friends and relatives and step into an industry that is unfamiliar to outsiders. Among them, one victim expressed that living a life confined to home chores and child care limits the people she can contact to other full-time mothers like her, making it quite difficult to connect with those who work outside.
For Xie Zuping, both her child’s elementary education and family responsibilities weighed on her shoulders. Her husband frequently expressed dissatisfaction for her not working for a long time, suggesting that she should run a breakfast shop by the school gate or propose cleaning the streets, criticizing her housewife status and thinking she needed to find something to do. Although Xie Zuping tried working as a nanny, the disrespect from her clients made her feel very embarrassed as they would often give her scrutinizing looks. Therefore, doing manual work at home became a relatively easy choice, without having to endure anyone’s orders, and according to the platform’s promises, she could easily earn more than 50,000 yuan per month. As a result, Xie Zuping invested all her savings of 120,000 yuan, which she had put aside for buying a house, into it.
These types of seemingly zero-investment manual labors are actually traps for scams, often using high processing fees as bait through various eye-catching promotional activities to induce victims to buy large quantities of material stock. In the Pule E-commerce incident that Xie Zuping got involved in, the partners absconded with the funds in 2023. Before the platform was exposed, manual work gave hopes to many mothers like Qu Hong, who thought they had finally found a reliable channel to earn living expenses. Additionally, a 38-year-old mother was cheated by a similar beading scam while raising surgery funds for her family, investing 350,000 yuan, most of which came from online loans.
The manual work scams are diverse, and notably, some high-profile cases involve companies that developed over thirty thousand agents across 23 provinces in just two months. In these cases, manual work is just a guise, and the real targets of the swindlers are the various levels of agency fees.
Most of the people called “agents” are mothers at home and women without stable incomes. They may not realize that their original intention to earn a little pocket money through handiwork could involve them in a pyramid scheme, ultimately turning them into tools for the deceivers to “weave their nets.” In the public cases that exist, there is already a group of mothers who have turned from ordinary victims into accomplices. When seeking work, they unwittingly accepted gray jobs such as leasing bank cards and helping others with capital transfers.
A mother of three, after being frustrated by a scam, cleverly joined the ranks as a “stooge” and quickly rose to become the leader of a scam group mainly composed of mothers, with over a hundred members. In a case reported by China’s Chang’an Network, a mother named Gong Jing was scammed out of 100,000 yuan by a criminal group. In 2022, she received a call from someone claiming to be a “platform customer service”, luring her into a WeChat group called “Funds Clearance Official Group”, where she was taught so-called ways to recover her losses and fell victim to a second scam, losing an additional 870,000 yuan.
In the end, the “platform customer service” who called her turned out to be a phone scam group made up of mothers. These operators mostly had only middle or even primary school education, stayed at home full-time with their children, and lacked financial sources. They took this part-time job found on the internet with a daily income of 200 yuan. Although they were aware that what they were doing was illegal, they still joined the scam without hesitation, tempted by the prospect of earning 500 yuan a day and the convenience of ‘commuting’ from home.
In a recent case, the leader of a scam group was sentenced to three years and four months in prison for fraud. Before the incident, she illegally obtained over 8,000 yuan in so-called “salaries” by illicit means.
A mother among the victims, Wen Yi, wrestled with the scammers for three days. She repeatedly emphasized that she had no control over finances and all the money was in her husband’s hands. She sought sympathy by posing as a single mother, a role developed from integrating the experiences of other victims – a typical image of someone without financial resources who is eager to prove their self-worth.
Wen Yi realized that since having children, it seemed easier to become a target for scammers, but she was not sure how her information was leaked. There are various scam methods, some send text messages claiming prize wins, others pretend to be community workers requesting to add WeChat contacts, and then lure them into scam groups. Faced with such situations, Wen Yi usually takes action by reporting and making complaints, and over time, she began to see through these scams and actively counterattacked the scammers.
It is worth mentioning that in the entanglement with the scammers, Wen Yi managed to make a small profit through “anti-scam” efforts, amounting to 1,000 yuan. Likewise, on the internet, some victims have also formed so-called “Anti-Scam Alliances”. However, sometimes scammers don’t proceed as expected; when some people try to profit the same way, they find the scammers have already withdrawn and fled.
After falling victim to fraud, some individuals no longer receive trust from their families. Society often adopts an indifferent or even accusatory attitude towards them. For instance, Li Ying, who dared not fight back after being swindled of a significant amount of money, suspected that the “counteraction experience” shared might be just another trap.
Unfortunately, on the internet, these victims have become part of the online landscape, where some people find a sense of superiority in their plights. In some cases, victims are even utilized as public warning materials; for example, the deceived women from Zhongshi Community in Ningbo were used in community cautionary campaigns.
Regarding job-hunting difficulties, a study by Renmin University of China found that, given the same background information, male job seekers are 1.42 times more likely to receive interview invitations than their female counterparts. Such structural dilemmas have long constrained many mothers’ employment opportunities.
In cases of fraud, some scams lure people with “zero tuition, learn while receiving orders,” offering popular courses such as Pr, Ae, C4D, short videos, etc. They promise deferred payment, but once a QR code is scanned to sign a billing agreement, the initial promises fail to materialize, and those attempting to withdraw are charged with exorbitant breach of contract fees and course costs.
For example, Niu Nana, a post-90s mother and professional designer, encountered three different scams during her maternity leave. Although she escaped a fake order scam, she couldn’t evade another video course scam promising “skill enhancement.”
Niu Nana received a proposal about a course to make popular videos. It included three video materials with AI-generated voiceovers that discussed life philosophies and assured that at least one of the videos would receive over ten thousand views if she followed the instructor’s guidance. As expected, Niu Nana finally experienced the thrill of one video surpassing ten thousand views. According to the “instructor,” what followed was a “golden era of traffic” that had to be taken advantage of.
Encouraged, Niu Nana didn’t hesitate to spend 1800 yuan on the course, only to be disappointed that the content was merely a compilation of free official tutorial videos that had been recorded. When she tried to publish videos following the course guidance, they were marked as “non-original” and couldn’t be published. It turned out one material had been sold to many people and already published by others. Niu Nana later discovered that the “instructor’s” account was suspicious and lost contact. Looking back at the once hopeful trending video, despite its thousands of views, it lacked any comments and was in fact manufactured hype made by the fraudsters buying traffic.
On the internet, Niu Nana also encountered many live streaming courses, which taught how to run e-commerce live streams and how to showcase personal style—like deliberately wearing ratty clothes and jumping around or running down country lanes with chickens and ducks in hand. A male presenter stressed the need for mutual support during live streams: “You will first support me, and I will support you later. If you aren’t willing to give, how can you expect to receive?” Niu Nana started her live stream to discover that the support came from fellow moms seeking mutual following and liking, and their support amounted to: “My money ends up in your pocket, and your money back in mine.” The real profiteers were the leading broadcasters who made money off of the hope and willingness of these mothers to “pay first.”
Niuna Na shared her experiences of being deceived on a social platform, but there are always mothers responding under her post with “please take me along.” These mothers did not truly understand the content of her post and mistakenly thought that it offered new part-time job opportunities.
