Since June, 27-year-old Li Na has spent at least two hours a day on her new side job: TikTok. She posts up to three makeup videos on her account daily — they share tips and showcase dramatic before-and-after transformations. ButLi doesn’t create any of the videos. Instead, she finds viral clips on Chinese social media platforms like Douyin, Bilibili, and Xiaohongshu, and after a round of light edits, reposts them to TikTok. Li and many others like her post these videos in the hope that they too will go viral on TikTok, earning them an income through the app’s Creator Fund or from affiliate marketing.

The practice is known as banyun in Chinese, which translates to “moving” or “smuggling.” It has attracted a lot of attention in the country over the past year, with “gurus” and influencers selling guides and training sessions on making money through banyun. Once trained, they promise, anyone can gather a massive TikTok following and make money by promoting products for a few hours of work per day.

But the so-called gurus are selling a dream that’s outdated and misleading, George Gu, founder of NewMe, a social e-commerce firm specializing in TikTok, told Rest of World. TikTok’s platform policy does not allow posting any content that infringes on someone else’s intellectual property rights. If reported, these accounts risk being removed, suspended, or terminated permanently.

“This [banyun] is not allowed on TikTok and we remove content and ban accounts that engage in this behavior as soon as we detect it,” wrote Jamie Favazza, a TikTok spokesperson, in an email to Rest of World.

Mindy Liu, 22, decided to try banyun after reading a post on the lifestyle social media app Xiaohongshu about a woman who claimed to have started an e-commerce business on TikTok from home. Liu contacted Xindi Consulting, the account that had made the post, and was quickly connected to a “mentor” on WeChat. The mentor made the process sound effortless, and told Liu she could quickly generate $1,000 a week in income from TikTok’s Creator Fund and affiliate marketing. Liu’s mentor also quoted her a fee of $550 for training, which amounted to more than half her savings. She eventually ended up paying it. 

In exchange, Liu received a hefty document over 100 pages in length, detailing the steps she needed to take. She chose home products as her niche, and scoured Chinese social media for popular videos featuring organization tips and product hacks. TikTok is blocked in China, so Liu needed a reliable virtual private network (VPN); she bought one from her mentor for an additional $70 a year. She used the app CapCut to edit the video, also cropping and flipping it from left to right to avoid copyright infringement. 

Li, who runs the makeup-focused account, also removes one frame every 2–3 seconds of a video before she reposts it to TikTok. The resulting difference in video quality is almost impossible for humans to notice, but she was promised that it would be enough to fool TikTok.

Despite her efforts, the rewards never followed. After two months, Li’s makeup account had just 84 followers. Although the videos she reposted were wildly popular on Douyin, they garnered just over a few hundred views on TikTok. Most have fewer than 10 likes.

Liu tried to reach out to her mentor on WeChat, only to find that they had vanished: Their account had been deleted. “I am in deep emotional and financial distress now,” Liu told Rest of World. “I started working on TikTok banyun because I didn’t have much money. Now I am in debt because of the training fee.”

Even banyun posters who’ve found a degree of success have struggled to maintain it. Xiaoting Wang paid a banyun mentor around $700 to start her business. With a background in video editing, she found tweaking and reposting videos easy, and started a few pet accounts in October last year. By the following February, one of her accounts had grown big enough to qualify for TikTok’s Creator Fund — the supposed final step to riches in the banyun playbook. But Wang’s income has since remained between $1–$3, far below the $100 a day her mentor had promised. When she reached out to the mentor for further advice, they disappeared.

“It has become draining,” Wang told Rest of World. “I started to think it’s not worth three hours of my time every day.” In May, she sold all her accounts to a livestreaming agency for 2,000 yuan ($278). 

Despite their struggles, Li and Liu aren’t quitting TikTok yet. Li plans to create her own makeup videos, hoping it will be more successful than stealing content from elsewhere. Liu, meanwhile, has turned her attention to the promise of TikTok Shop, ByteDance’s new e-commerce marketplace. She has joined a WeChat group called “TikTok Players,” filled with other content farmers and product sellers. They are all looking for the right way to monetize their accounts, to make the most of what they feel is TikTok e-commerce’s inevitable rise around the world. 

“Chinese people are used to buying products on Douyin,” said Liu. “It’s just a matter of time that foreigners catch up to it.”