Scandal hits China’s star health care crowdfunding site Waterdrop
- Undercover report finds staff signing up patients to fill quotas, exaggerating their stories and failing to check financial details
- Founder Shen Peng apologises, suspends service team and launches investigation
A health care crowdfunding and online insurance sales platform in China apologised on Thursday after a series of scandals were exposed in an undercover media report.
The founder of Waterdrop – known as Shuidi in Chinese – Shen Peng, 32, also announced the suspension of the company’s offline service team and an in-depth investigation into the claims made by online media platform Pear Video on Saturday.
“After initial investigations we found different levels of offences against our service regulations among our offline staff,” Shen said. Later, in a separate Weibo post, Shen wrote: “If I cannot manage Shuidi well in future, I will be happy to hand it over to an NGO.”
The Pear Video report said Waterdrop service staff, who are deployed in more than 40 cities across China, had been going around hospitals asking patients to initiate crowdfunding projects and exaggerating their stories to attract sympathy and donations. The report also revealed that staff did not verify the financial situations of the targeted families.
Several Waterdrop staff told the undercover reporter they needed patients to start crowdfunding projects because they had quotas to fill and rewards to be had. One staff member said he would lose his job if he launched fewer than 35 projects each month. A staff member is paid up to 150 yuan ($11.35) for every project he helps to set up.