Is ofo’s operation model considered illegal fund-raising? Is there any fraud?

At this year’s 315 party, CCTV exposed the operation model of ofo and the deposit for exclusive bicycles is difficult to refund! There have been more than 210,000 complaints about Kuqi Bicycle alone. For this reason, the China Consumers Association specifically recommended strengthening the supervision of bicycle deposits. Some consumers said on the show: Kuqi Bicycle's deposit cannot be refunded, which is equivalent to open robbery! Some netizens even suggested that some bicycle-sharing companies raised more than 1 billion from unspecified targets through publicity. After the funds were cut off, they could not repay and the boss ran away. This was suspected of illegal fund-raising crimes!

First of all, it must be clear that the behavior of bicycle-sharing companies in collecting user deposits generally does not constitute the crime of illegally absorbing public deposits or fund-raising fraud. Otherwise, it would completely separate commercial activities and criminal crimes. The lines are blurred. We cannot regard excessive amounts of funds and broken capital chains as a crime, but we must treat such business trends and business risks with a normal mentality.

In judicial practice, for an act to constitute a fund-raising fraud, it needs to be publicly publicized and fraudulently used to attract deposits from unspecified objects in the form of guaranteed principal and interest payments, and the perpetrator must repay the deposits subjectively. There must be the purpose of illegal possession. There is no doubt that bicycle sharing is indeed publicized through the Internet. All kinds of advertisements are flying all over the place, and almost all means are used to promote it. As an Internet company, its users are unspecified netizens, which meets the requirement of being oriented to unspecified objects.

***Bike-sharing users’ payment of deposits is an act of submitting funds, and these deposits are promised to be refundable. Note that the word "commitment" is used here. On the surface, this is very similar to illegal fund-raising. However, since this act of submitting a deposit does not have the purpose of obtaining interest or profit, and the deposit that each user can submit is a fixed amount of about 200 yuan, this is different from the illegal fund-raising that guarantees principal and interest, and the more the better. Completely different nature. Moreover, the purpose of users paying the deposit is not to invest, but to ensure that the subsequent transactions between the two parties proceed smoothly. Therefore, this does not meet the requirements of the crime of illegally absorbing public deposits, let alone the crime of fund-raising fraud. Therefore, the act of collecting deposits for bike sharing will definitely not constitute the crime of illegal fund-raising, that is, the crime of illegally absorbing public deposits or the crime of fund-raising fraud.