Police in Liaoning are detaining 13 suspects for illegally raising more than three billion yuan, around 500 million US dollars.

The authorities have shut down a jewelry-store chain which ran a leasing service.

Authorities contend the operation, which had over 150-stores, had been scamming people, promising their deposits would be used to invest in a gold mine.

There was no mine.

Wang Meijie heads the company involved in the alleged scheme.

"We let people try our jewelry for free. Though it was free, we had an agreement with customer on how long they must return the jewelry. They can pay us a deposit and take the jewelry. We collect a lot of deposits from our customers. The deposits we collected were higher than the value of the jewelry."

Xiu Liang is the lead investigator.

"The key point is that they would use the lure of significant returns to lure people into investing, even though there was no gold mine to be invested in."

Authorities say little of the money stolen from customers can be refunded, as the suspects have already spent most of it.