China’s transition into a market economy — at times lightly regulated and often marked with corrupt governance — has bred an uncountable number of hucksters and tricksters, from those selling fake tea, poisonous pork, or misplaced copper to people like Wang Zhendong, executed in 2008 for swindling $416 million from thousands of investors with a get-rich-quick ant breeding scheme. But perhaps none have been weirder than the Jewish People’s Wisdom Network, an organization that, for at least several months from 2008 to 2009, played off Chinese people’s widely held belief that Jews possess a vast and knowable body of knowledge that helps people get rich quickly.

“Was I cheated by the Jewish People’s Wisdom Network?” is a question that, even today, lurks in some of the lonely corners of the Chinese Internet. In dozens of April 2009 posts on Baidu’s question and answer service and other scattered websites, anonymous netizens asked variations of this question. “Will the Changsha Jewish People’s Wisdom Network give me my money back?” asked one, referring to a midsize city in central China, best known for being the site of a young Mao Zedong’s political awakening. “Isn’t the Suzhou Jewish People’s Wisdom Network a swindling company?” asked one poster on the obscure website QGanjue, referring to a Chinese city famous for its gardens. Netizens complained of the mysterious Jewish People’s Wisdom Network swindling them in at least a dozen of China’s largest cities, from the cosmopolitan Shanghai to the Cleveland-esque Hefei, in a mystery of Talmudic complexity that may never be solved.