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Suspects held in fake online purchases case
From:Shine  |  2021-02-05 19:26

Some suspects in their office where they are alleged to have been generating fake purchases

Fifteen people have been arrested for allegedly providing fake purchases of products for Internet shops to boost their sales volume, Shanghai police said on Friday.

The suspects generated over 60 million fake orders for the shops, according to the police.

Police in the Pudong New Area began an investigation after learning about false shipping information and false comments under certain products on some large e-commerce platforms.

The fake purchases were generated in two ways, police said. In some cases, delivery company workers were engaged to generate delivery information of nonexistent parcels. In others, shops would deliver low-value items, such as facial tissues, to generate real delivery information, police said.

The latter method has become popular because of an ongoing crackdown on illegal operations within delivery companies, police said.

However, the delivery companies are now engaged in a different way. Businesses can try out delivery services by delivering parcels which don’t have to have recipients, but usually only one or two such parcels are delivered. Police found that certain Internet shops had delivered hundreds of thousands of such “test parcels.”

A total of 40 suspects were caught in nine provinces by the police, and apart from the 15 who have been arrested, the rest are not under detention.

The suspects could face a criminal charge of running an illegal business, police said.

ChenKang, a police officer of the trial squad of the area’s economic police, said he had heard complaints from some Internet shop owners that it was impossible to run their businesses without creating fake purchases.

“Otherwise, they said, their products would never be able to appear in the first 20 product pages,” he said. “The result is the burgeoning underground gangs which offer fake purchases.”

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