Authorities have acted amid reports - not all confirmed - of investor complaints about compensation from peer-to-peer platforms that hit trouble.

China has stepped up police presence in the financial district of its capital, with dozens of officers gathering outside the banking regulators’ offices amid some claims that people were seeking compensation from failed peer-to-peer platforms.

The P2P sector in China has been rocked by a number of scandals. In 2016, a top executive at Chinese conglomerate Fosun, which has bought a number of European private banks, dubbed P2P in China as “basically a scam”. (Click here to read about problems with this sector in China.)

“There were loads of security people on the street this morning,” one man leaving an office building near the headquarters of the regulator, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, was quoted by Reuters as saying.

The banking regulator could not be immediately reached outside business hours for comment, the news service said. 

Ezubao, once China’s largest P2P lending platform, folded in 2016 after it turned out to be a Ponzi scheme that collected RMB59.8 billion ($87.6 billion) from more than 900,000 investors. By the time police made arrests in early 2016, the company had failed to repay RMB38 billion, the newswire said.