How an army of investigators and short-sellers got the world to wake up and smell the fraud.
Illustration by Nigel Buchanan
The secret operation got underway late last year. A small army of researchers were told to fan out across China, to cities big and small, to collect documents and videotape the activities of the prime target.
The organizers had a hunch that Luckin Coffee, China’s fast-growing challenger to Starbucks and a company traded in the U.S. stock market, was falsifying financial statements to exaggerate its sales. The organizer set out to prove it, deploying 1,510 investigators to count sales and r
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