(Beijing) – Top executives at an online lending platform that ran a large Ponzi scheme that bilked hundreds of thousands of small investors out of more than 50 billion yuan were among a group of people employed by the company who have been detained, the official Xinhua News Agency reported on January 31.

Police detained 21 people involved in running Ezubo, a peer-to-peer lending website that claimed to let individuals lend money to businesses, on January 14, Xinhua reported. Among those arrested was Ding Ning, chairman of Yucheng International Holdings Group Ltd., a financial company based in the capital that runs the website.

Ezubo attracted 50 billion yuan from about 900,000 investors from July 2014 to December by promising high annual returns, the report said.

"As far as I know, 95 percent of the investment projects on Ezubo are fake," Xinhua cited Yong Lei, a former Yucheng executive who was among those arrested, as saying. Ezubo bought or stole information about companies and created fake investment projects using their names, he said.

Only one out of the 207 companies that Ezubo said had borrowed money through the platform actually used it, police told Xinhua.

China's peer-to-peer lending industry has enjoyed years of rapid growth, but the boom is ending as lending websites are caught embezzling deposits and regulators start to reign in the sector.

Police raided Ezubo's offices in several cities on December 8 because local financial regulators found signs the website was running short of money and that executives had started to move funds, destroy evidence and plan to flee, Xinhua said.

Executives may have started sending money to a war-torn area of Myanmar on China's border, people close to Ezubo also told Caixin.

Ezubo executives buried 80 bags of documents six meters underground on the outskirts of Hefei, the capital of the eastern province of Anhui, Xinhua reported. Police used two excavators to dig the documents up, it said.

Company executives squandered money they got from Ezubo on personal items and excessively high salaries, Xinhua said. Ding gave 1 billion yuan worth of cash, cars, luxury goods and real estate to women with whom he had "close relationships," Xinhua said. He had dozens of secretaries wear uniforms designed by luxury brands as a way to bolster the firm's image.

Zhang Min, a former president of Yucheng Group who was also among those arrested, received 50 million yuan from Ding on top of a 130 million yuan villa in Singapore and a 12 million yuan pink diamond ring, Xinhua said.

Yucheng and its subsidiaries spent more than 100 million on marketing Zhang as "the most beautiful female president in the Internet finance industry," the report said.

(Rewritten by Chen Na)