Fifteen people in Zhuhai, South China's Guangdong Province, were detained on suspicion of assembling a cult organization and committing the crimes of fraud and rape, the local police department announced on its official Sina Weibo on Wednesday.

Zhuhai police said they have cracked down this illegal organization, named Huazangfamen, which has more than 1,000 members. They said they had questioned more than 60 suspects as part of the investigation and detained 15.

The police also searched areas in which cult members had gathered and seized pamphlets and other belongings.

The leader of the cult, surnamed Wu, 47, allegedly established the organization in the 1990s and had labeled himself as Buddha reincarnated in the form of one of his descendants.

"A cult normally asks its members to worship a 'god' or 'Buddha,' but in reality it is usually the cult founder himself, based on some fabricated fallacies rather than established religious doctrines," Shen Guiping, a religious studies expert at the Central Institute of Socialism, told the Global Times.

The Huazangfamen members were required to worship Wu, who claimed to be a "Budda".

Shen said that cults often promote doctrines that are anti-social or against humanity and try to accumulate wealth through various means.

Wu used the regulations of Buddhism to force the believers to obey him and established a strict hierarchy to actively engage in illegal cult activity, police said.

"The cult usually uses spiritual control and absolute obedience as methods of controlling their believers," said Shen.

Wu was sentenced to 11 years in jail on charges of running an illegal business and the unauthorized issuing of stocks by the Beijing High People's Court in November 2001, according to the organization's website.

China has launched a campaign to crack down on cults after six members of a cult named Quannengshen, or Almighty God, beat a woman to death at McDonalds in Zhaoyuan, Shandong Province, on May 28, after she refused to provide her telephone number.

The public security bureau in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region has detained over 800 members of Almighty God and 580 from the Mentuhui, or Disciples Sect cult since 2012.