posters team, typically college students and unemployed people, that gets 30 to 50 cents per validated post; a resources team that registers and collects online user IDs; and a PR team that maintains relationships with social media webmasters. Reasons Online marketing in China has become a big and profitable business and has spawned many Internet public relations agencies. Internet water armies working for these PR firms not only advertise products but also remove any negative feedback that they find. Many celebrity agencies in the entertainment industry and their die-hard fans have been willing to spend a lot of money to hire Internet water armies to generate positive online reviews for their songs and movies. The armies can range from a handful of people to hundreds, who often help celebrities inflate their social media accounts' followers with thousands of fake followers. In addition, some entertainment companies use Internet water armies to bump up film ratings and smear a rival's reputation. Many people who join an Internet water army think online paid posting is a new type of online part-time job opportunity and an easy way to make money. With the ubiquity of personal computers and smart phones along with easy-to-use microblogging platforms, the entry barrier is low. The income of Internet water armies is a primary reason why many people choose to join them, more than 60% of Internet water army members earn more than a thousand yuan per month by posting and deleting reviews. Current affairs In 2017, Chinese Internet regulators imposed strict bans on hiring paid posters as a part of a sweeping campaign to tighten Internet control. Police arrested more than 200 people in 40 water army cases and closed 5,000 paid poster accounts since May 2017. In June, a man was sentenced to five years and nine months in prison and fined 920,000 yuan ($135,000) for generating fake transactions and product reviews on Taobao; it is the first judicial case that a suspect was charged with this offense in China. In July 2018, the producer of Asura said that their movie's ratings was brought down by fake comments on an influential rating platform. In August 2018, Guangzhou's latest move targeting the Internet water army was about a larger scale crackdown launched by China's public security authority, involving 77 suspects and 4 million yuan ($635,000). Legality Net marketing companies like Internet water armies sometimes operate on murky legal