A company in northeast China raised 3 billion yuan (US$725 million) from gullible members of the public by promising big profits from a project to breed ants.

Donghua Ecological Breed Co Ltd, in Liaoning Province, offered returns of 35 percent to 60 percent on investment in the bogus project.

The Ministry of Public Security (MPS) cited the case on Thursday as an example of how fraudsters were getting more devious and imaginative in their schemes.

Chinese police investigated 62,000 economic crimes in the first 10 months this year, an increase of 9.1 percent over the same period last year.

Economic crimes, especially those involving large numbers of people, such as pyramid selling or fund-raising fraud, "could trigger social instability and impede the economic security of the country", warned Gao Feng, deputy director of the MPS economic crime investigation bureau.

Pyramid schemes were being sold through the Internet, Gao said.

A medicine pyramid selling company in Guizhou Province enrolled more than 100,000 members on-line in Shandong and Henan provinces and illegally sold 126 million yuan worth of medicines.

Police ferreted out 49,000 of the reported cases, a rise of 4.3 percent, and retrieved 12.94 billion yuan, or 51.8 percent more than the same time last year, said Gao.

Police recovered 399 million yuan in 507 cases involving the illegal pooling of public funds and 169 million yuan from 501 cases of alleged fund-raising fraud.

(Xinhua News Agency November 23, 2006)