Beijing police increased efforts to tackle online fraud and solved 1,051 such cases last year, the city’s Public Security Bureau said in a statement on Friday.

During the year, 548 people suspected of online fraud were detained and 6.2 million pieces of illegal information were removed from cyberspace, the statement said.

“We administratively punished websites that illegally published information 298 times, made use of our official micro blog and WeChat to combat rumors and answered online fraud-related questions from more than 19,000 netizens,” police said in the statement.

Over the past year, police officers posted 1,356 messages about how to prevent being cheated online, and called 4,600 volunteers to help circulate anti-fraud knowledge, it added.

At the beginning of 2017, police officers in the city found three companies in Guangdong, Fujian and Jiangxi provinces had allegedly swindled money by sending more than 2.6 million text messages to students. Following an investigation, 27 suspects were detained in March.

“The messages looked like advertisements, so many students found it hard to distinguish them from genuine messages,” the police said in the statement.

In the case, the police officers also seized 13 computers and 13 mobile phones, cutting the source at the root, it added.