Speaking of online "smuggling", it is a case where individual buyers maliciously take advantage of after-sales rules and do not return goods but only provide refunds. Recently, the Beijing police uncovered a new type of "wool harvesting" fraud case. What is different from the past is that this time the criminal gang pretended to be online store operators and used the platform's advertising deposit fee refund mechanism to maliciously make repeated refunds and illegally profit from it. The origin of this case dates back to July this year.
Zhang Kaifei, a police officer from the Internet Security Corps of the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau: In the process of connecting police and enterprises in July this year, we found that some individuals were using some accounts. This method of recharging advertising service fees was equivalent to achieving two refunds for one recharge.
It is understood that the platform adopts a pre-deposit model for advertising promotion fees, and the unconsumed advertising fee balance in the account supports merchants to apply for refunds. The platform has set up two independent refund channels: online self-service application and offline manual customer service. The abnormal problems discovered this time were all concentrated in the refund application process. After preliminary inspection, more than 50 online stores were involved.
Chen Pingjin, a police officer from the Criminal Investigation Corps of the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau: Through investigation, we initially found that there should be a total of 56 accounts (stores) involved in this kind of abnormal refund. The characteristics of his account are obviously different from ordinary corporate accounts, because it takes two months to upgrade from a personal store to a corporate store. Basically, after these stores can upgrade to a corporate store, he will immediately upload the business license and then create a corporate account.
As the investigation deepened, the criminal gang headed by Peng and Mo gradually emerged. They first register a large number of personal stores on the online platform. After the registration time meets the requirements, they upload the corporate industrial and commercial business license, upgrade these personal stores to corporate stores, and recharge the store's advertising account.
After the recharge is completed, an online refund will be applied immediately, and at the same time, the organizer will contact the platform customer service to apply for a manual offline refund. In other words, the gang used the online platform to apply for refunds of advertising deposits online and offline, and maliciously repeated applications to achieve the purpose of making illegal profits.
Chen Pingjin, a police officer from the Criminal Investigation Corps of the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau: We found that these 56 corporate stores did not have any actual business activities. After registration, they would immediately recharge the corporate advertising account. After the refund, the account store would be canceled. The purpose is very obvious, which is to defraud. This is an organized and premeditated gang behavior.
On the basis of fully grasping the gang's organizational structure and criminal evidence, the Beijing police recently organized police forces to go to many provinces and cities outside Beijing to carry out concentrated network closing operations, and arrested all gang members including Peng and Mo in one fell swoop. After review, Peng accidentally discovered that when the same store applied for refunds online and offline at the same time, there would be repeated refunds when operating an online store, so he worked with Mo and others to organize a large number of people to register stores and implement repeated refunds to illegally make profits.
According to statistics, as of the incident, the gang had used this method to illegally make profits of more than 2.2 million yuan. Currently, 14 members of the gang have been criminally detained by the Beijing police in accordance with the law, and the case is under further investigation. At the same time, the Beijing police also guided the companies involved to further optimize preventive measures and improve the refund mechanism to avoid economic losses.
Zhang Kaifei, a police officer from the Cyber Security Corps of the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau: Malicious use of platform rules to repeatedly refund fees is suspected of being illegal. According to relevant provisions of the criminal law, those with larger amounts will face criminal penalties. The public security agencies will resolutely crack down in accordance with the law. If the public finds that someone around them organizes or teaches such refund tutorials, please report it to the platform or the public security agency in a timely manner.
