Report from our newspaper (Reporter Nie Guochun) In recent years, the blind box economy has been favored by young consumer groups, but some businesses have used false propaganda to attract customers. Recently, the Supreme People's Court released the third batch of typical cases for people's jurors to participate in trials. In one case, a company filed an administrative lawsuit after being punished for falsely advertising the probability of winning a blind box prize, but the lawsuit was dismissed by the court.
The case shows that from May to October 2022, some consumers complained on the Sichuan Provincial Market Supervision Complaint and Reporting Platform that there was a large gap between the actual prize probability of a company’s blind box products and the prize probability announced by the App platform. The company sells blind boxes online by operating the "Yuanqi Player" App and WeChat mini program. Each blind box has five categories of products, and the probability of consumers winning is marked in categories. The main page of the blind box is marked in red font with the words "The probability of the product has been authenticated by judicial appraisal, please feel free to buy", and uploaded a "Forensic Appraisal Opinion" issued by a judicial appraisal agency. The market supervision department believed that the company used the "Forensic Appraisal Opinion" to mislead consumers, which was false propaganda, and ordered it to immediately stop illegal activities and imposed a fine of 700,000 yuan. The company refused to accept the penalty decision and applied for administrative review, and a certain municipal government upheld the decision. The company later sued the local market supervision department and the municipal government to the People's Court of Dongpo District, Meishan City, Sichuan Province. In accordance with the law, the court heard the case by a three-person collegial panel composed of one people's assessor and two judges. It ruled that the company's behavior constituted false propaganda and rejected the company's lawsuit. After the first-instance verdict, the company was dissatisfied and appealed. The second-instance verdict of the Meishan Intermediate People's Court rejected the appeal and upheld the original verdict.
According to reports, the people's jurors in this case questioned the content of the forensic appraisal based on their long-term experience in handling cases of false advertising of agricultural products. They pointed out that the "Forensic Appraisal Opinion" only appraised part of the program code for the probability of opening the box, and did not appraise the complete code of the App and WeChat applet. The appraisal of the calculation method of product probability is not equal to the probability of opening the box of the product, and the two cannot be confused. People's assessors believe that merchants appear to be guiding, but in fact they are misleading. It is difficult for consumers to see through the trap of differences between appraisal content and promotional rhetoric, and it is easy for consumers to misjudge transaction risks.
Based on the public's consumption habits and shopping experience, the people's juror proposed that the company's use of "official" and "authentication" as endorsements has a potential impact on consumers' purchasing behavior and constitutes false propaganda. This kind of chaos that uses labels such as "forensic appraisal" as a marketing cover to infringe on the legitimate rights and interests of consumers should be curbed to further create a fair and honest market environment. The views of the people's assessors were adopted by the collegial panel and included in the judgment documents to strengthen the interpretation and reasoning of the law, which effectively improved the social acceptance of the case judgment.
