Idle accounts inexplicably have more "ghost" shopping records

Issuing coupons is a common means for e-commerce platforms to attract consumers. However, some people have glimpsed "business opportunities" from it, illegally obtaining idle high-quality accounts on e-commerce platforms to sell to "Silk Wool" people. Recently, after a public prosecution initiated by the Huishan District Procuratorate of Wuxi City, Jiangsu Province, the court sentenced defendant Zhang Mou to two years' imprisonment and a fine of 15,000 yuan for the crime of infringing on citizens' personal information.

Ms. Xiao, who lives in Huishan District, registered an account with a QQ mailbox on a large shopping website and bound her mobile phone number. A few years ago, the website launched a mobile app version, she downloaded the mobile phone client, directly used WeChat login to register a new account, no longer use the old account. One day, Ms. Xiao logged on to the old account on a whim, found the password error, and after retrieving the password through mobile phone verification, she found that there were 15 more shopping records, including color TVs, air conditioners, milk and other items. Although Ms. Xiao did not actually pay the bill, let alone property damage, she was still frightened by these "ghost" shopping records that appeared out of thin air, so she immediately called the police.

"These items are all coupons and the prices are very cheap." Ms. Shaw described it this way. According to the clues, the police arrested Chen Mou, the person involved in the case, and locked the criminal suspect Zhang Mou.

At the beginning of 2018, Zhang learned from the Internet that some e-commerce platforms will issue coupons to some high-quality customers from time to time, and some discounts are very large, and they can make profits by selling these accounts with preferential qualifications. So Zhang joined some "preferential bargaining" groups, downloaded the information in the group, learned to use the software to crack the account password, and successfully obtained more than one million high-quality account information. Later, Zhang met Chen Mou, a buyer who recycled the high-quality account of the e-commerce platform, and sold him about 470 groups of high-quality accounts of a shopping website, with an illegal profit of 3,000 yuan; sold about 1 million sets of information such as mailboxes and corresponding passwords to him, and illegally profited 2,400 yuan.

What exactly are these accounts used for? According to Chen's confession, he first joined a QQ group to buy a mobile phone, saw that someone used the e-commerce large coupon in other people's accounts to buy a cheap mobile phone, felt profitable, tried to use the high-quality account to grab the coupon, and then according to the customer's release of the purchase information, placed an order on behalf of the customer, and then received the payment and commission for the goods to be sent to the other party. After the incident, Chen was dealt with in another case, and Zhang absconded on news and turned himself in in September 2021.

(Source: Procuratorial Daily Author: Tang Xiaoyu Zhang Mengke)