Parents who are not good at using mobile phones were secretly enabled for automatic deductions just by clicking on an ad. Chen Yan was still very angry when she thought about what happened to the elderly at home recently, "Isn't this robbery?" What Chen Yan was referring to was the Internet insurance platform Yuanbao, which secretly deducted a total of more than 2,500 yuan from the elderly a year without the elderly's knowledge. Recently, an elderly person asked her for help. While she was striving for a refund, she searched on social media and found that there were numerous cases of elderly people being automatically deducted by Yuanbao Insurance.
A large number of young people on social platforms have become the main force begging for money from their parents. They can't help but question, is Internet insurance only targeting the elderly?
Pervasive deductions
When the old man first asked Chen Yan for help, he thought he had mistakenly clicked on something in the short video and was deducted. However, Chen Yan took the phone and checked it carefully and found out, "The deduction is an automatic deduction in Alipay, and it has been continuously deducted for more than a year."
"The first month was 6 yuan, and then it became a deduction of more than 200 yuan every month." Chen Yan carefully checked the deduction form and found that it said "Yuanbao Insurance".According to the old man's recollection, once when accepting photo information from a WeChat group, a suspected mini-program advertisement suddenly popped up. After he could not exit anyway, he mistakenly thought that he had to pay to receive the information. When he saw "6 yuan", he thought it was not a lot, so he chose to pay. But he never expected that this seemingly normal payment would be automatically deducted without his knowledge.
"There will be text messages to remind you of the deductions, but the elderly don't check text messages very much. In addition, the pension is relatively generous, so no deductions were found for more than a year. In one year, a total of 2,500 yuan was deducted."
After discovering the situation, Chen Yan immediately looked for ways to defend her rights. After searching social media platforms, she found a large number of similar cases. After checking and seeking help from the "grievance strategies" shared by many netizens, she learned that she needed to call Yuanbao customer service for a tough and argumentative rights defense. In the end, she gradually recovered the relevant funds through multiple communications.
Chen Yan's experience is not unique.After searching multiple personal cases, Phoenix Technology found that Yuanbao Insurance’s deduction trap has long been woven into a network covering multiple channels. From commonly used large platforms such as WeChat to seemingly normal text message reminders, every entrance may become an ambush point for the elderly.
Chen Yan also revealed that in addition to her elders, her friend's father also accidentally purchased insurance in an advertisement on JD.com and was deducted more than 400 yuan, and then called the customer service number and complained to the 12378 platform to protect the rights and interests of his family.
Coincidentally, Li Yating's mother did not escape this routine. On October 26 this year, Li Yating's mother received a text message from the insurance company because her ID card expired - click on the link to renew her ID card. "Because the situation was true and the insurance company was known to my mother, I clicked on it without too much suspicion. However, the link that was redirected directly to another unknown webpage after clicking on it. The old man did not read it carefully and followed the prompts to upload his ID card. It was not until the last step of filling in the information that the screen displayed 'Purchase a million-dollar medical insurance' that he realized something was wrong."
Li Yating told Phoenix.com that during the entire process, her family did not enter their bank card account number and password, but only checked the payment method "Industrial and Commercial Bank of China", but completed the purchase and debit."The amount of the deduction was very small, one was 0.6 yuan, the other was more than 1 yuan, and I did not receive a text message indicating that the insurance purchase was successful."
Li Yating finally saw the deduction information from the mobile banking app. "It is very strange that there is no access record at all from the browsing history of the mobile phone."
When Li Yating called the customer service number of ICBC to inquire, the customer service responded that she might have encountered a fraud, and the bank suggested reporting the loss so that she would not be deducted again. It was through feedback from ICBC that Li Yating learned that the deductor was called "Yuanbao". Then when I went to the bank to reopen the account, the bank staff said, "You are not the first to ask. He deducted 1 yuan and 2 yuan at the beginning, and in the second month it became hundreds of yuan."
After searching the Black Cat Complaint Platform, ifeng.com Technology found that there were 1,955 complaints related to the search term "Yuanbao Insurance". Most of the complaints were "unreasonable deductions", "deception to purchase insurance" and "false information". Among them, the channels and platforms involved were diverse - JD.com, Rong360, Shuidibao, etc., making it difficult for users to guard against.
Use technology to open the market and use technology to accurately harvest
Yuanbao was founded in 2019. Its founder Fang Rui graduated from Tsinghua University PBC School of Finance and joined NetEase in 2003. In more than ten years since joining NetEase, he founded NetEase e-commerce and NetEase Payment, and also served as NetEase Group Vice President and Head of Group Technology Department.
Technology is a sharp edge for Yuanbao to open up the market. Its core business logic is to customize and distribute personal insurance products for United Insurance Company and provide after-sales services such as claims settlement. As an Internet insurance intermediary platform, its success is to help traditional insurance companies with precise distribution.
The prospectus shows that in 2021, 2022 and 2023, Yuanbao will achieve revenue of 385 million yuan, 850 million yuan and 2.045 billion yuan respectively. In the first half of 2024, Yuanbao achieved profitability for the first time. On April 30, 2025, Yuanbao successfully knocked on the door of Nasdaq.
The latest financial report shows that in the second quarter of 2025, the company's revenue hit a record high, with total revenue of approximately 1.07 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 25.2%; net profit reached 305 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 55.6%. As of June 30, 2025, Yuanbao's cash reserves reached 3.42 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 99.1%, almost doubling the same period last year.
The core competitiveness that supports the rapid growth of Yuanbao's performance is its unique "AI + insurance" model. Fang Rui once said in a sharing that "the company had its own AI algorithm engineers and big data team on the first day it was founded." As of the end of June this year, Yuanbao has developed more than 4,800 models capable of analyzing more than 5,300 tags, an increase of 400 models and 1,000 tags compared with the same period last year.
In other words, thanks to these models, Yuanbao can accurately target every potential consumer.
Algorithms do arithmetic problems, and they themselves do not have values. It is the users behind them who control the values. However, after possessing the powerful tool of algorithm, Yuan Bao has frequently been involved in controversy.
As early as March 2022, Yuanbao Insurance was warned and fined 10,000 yuan by the former Shaanxi Supervision Bureau of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (now updated to the Shaanxi Supervision Bureau of the State Financial Supervision Administration) for "not carrying out Internet insurance brokerage business in accordance with regulations." And its “1 Yuan Guarantee” business still attracted many complaints and media reports. To this day, complaints against Yuanbao Insurance’s “1 Yuan Insurance” can still be seen on some social platforms, claiming that it is “false propaganda”, or that the insurance fee is forced to be deducted without knowing it and the fee is automatically deducted the next month. Among them, there are many middle-aged and elderly people who have been deceived.
According to previous media reports, "1 yuan insurance" claims to be "0 yuan, 1 yuan in the first month" or even "free", which makes many middle-aged and elderly consumers think that they can buy an insurance worth several thousand yuan at a very low price, but in fact it only spreads the premium to later stages. After being deceived, consumers encountered the problem of difficulty in getting refunds.
At the end of October 2024, the official website of the Gansu Provincial Market Supervision Bureau released the "Gansu Provincial Consumer Association Typical Cases of Consumer Complaints from January to September 2024". The first case was the forced purchase and sale of online insurance.
In the case, Mr. Jiang discovered that RMB 348.7 and RMB 316.4 had been inexplicably deducted from his bank card on August 21. He questioned whether the bank had authorized the debits. After inquiries, it was confirmed that the amounts were deducted by Capital Insurance Agency (Guangdong) Co., Ltd. (Capital Insurance for short) and Yuanbao Insurance Guangxi Branch through Alipay. With the assistance of the bank insurance rights protection hotline and the Provincial Consumers Association, the insurance company agreed to refund the money. The Provincial Consumers Association also criticized the two insurance intermediaries involved through the hotline. According to Tianyancha, the indirect shareholder of Capital Insurance is Yuanbao Digital (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd., and the actual controller is Fang Rui, and the company is a member of Yuanbao Insurance Research Institute Group.
In addition to precise positioning, the reason why Yuanbao Insurance's traps are "unpreventable" and "ubiquitous" is also inseparable from the high-flying marketing model behind it. It invests heavily in digital advertising and mobile Internet advertising. Sales and marketing expenses have long accounted for a large proportion in financial reports.According to the financial report, Yuanbao’s sales and marketing expenses in the first quarter and second quarter of this year were 493.2 million yuan and 602.1 million yuan respectively, totaling for the six months.
Looking at the insurance industry, its core pain point is not product shortage, but mismatch between supply and demand and lack of trust. Technical reconstruction should have been Yuanbao's core weapon, but in addition to solving the fundamental pain points, it has also become a sharp blade for accurately ambushing the elderly.
When thinking about why he should enter the insurance industry, Fang Rui once expressed: "China's insurance industry is huge, with a scale of 4 trillion yuan back then, and now it has reached 5.7 trillion yuan. The most important thing is that we believe that insurance, especially the health insurance industry, is of great value to the people. As China's population ages, the medical field has increasingly become the focus of many people's attention."
Fang Rui boasted that Yuanbao had a strong team and that it was an excellent team overall. "That is to say, not only the technology is strong, but also the product team, operation team, promotion team, brand team, etc. must be strong. Only in this way can it really do well. As long as a company has a shortcoming, it may be difficult to succeed now."
However, Yuanbao has not yet given a clear answer on how to find a balance between technological innovation and social value. This is also a long-term proposition that all insurance technology companies must face.