The cross-border black production chain in the judgment: tens of millions of identity information were resold, and 2 million yuan was earned by issuing empty packages

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In a residential house in Putian City, more than 10 million pieces of personal information lie in one of Fan's mobile hard disks, and one of the purposes of these illegally purchased information is to register amazon seller accounts, and the income of each account is 200 yuan to 2000 yuan.

Six months later, Fan was seized by the police, and the court sentenced him to four years and three months in prison, recovered nearly 150,000 yuan of illegal income, and fined him 40,000 yuan. And those illegally obtained personal information, it is not known how many times it has passed through the black market, and it has been repeatedly bought and sold without the knowledge of the parties.

Similar information black and gray production, from upstream to downstream, has formed a complete chain, and is mainly distributed in the field of games, social networking and e-commerce. Among them, due to the maturity of China's supply chain development in recent years and the strong control of the epidemic in China in the context of the global epidemic, a large number of overseas orders have accelerated, and gray and black products have also joined the intrusive cross-border e-commerce.

However, the chaos has actually begun from the day of the start of cross-border e-commerce, and some criminals have used the platform's mechanism of attaching importance to evaluation, exploiting the loopholes of the platform, illegally collecting personal information, brushing single control evaluations, and falsely performing contracts... Each link has a "clear division of labor", forming a secret industrial chain, and some people even rely on this to make millions of yuan.

At the end of April 2021, Amazon began a large-scale wave of store closures, and about 3,000 accounts of about 600 Chinese brands were blocked by Amazon, and the estimated loss amount has exceeded 100 billion yuan. On September 24, Amazon officially stated that most of the Chinese sellers who were blocked were due to "repeated, repeated, and serious abuse of reviews and many other irregularities."

By consulting hundreds of judgments involving cross-border e-commerce black industry in the past few years, we can glimpse the internal interest disputes of relevant personnel, including a large number of public prosecution cases involving huge amounts of money and serious criminal nature, and the entire black industry chain is mainly concentrated in the three links of opening stores, accusations and evaluations, and performance of contracts.

In the verdict, the gray side of cross-border e-commerce is exposed to the sun.

Shop open

Under the background of the epidemic, consumer consumption habits have further shifted to online, and many new buyers have also eager to try, and more than 1 million new stores will open on the Amazon platform in 2020. In addition to the regular store opening process, many people have the idea of "doing the next store agency", and even more, they are involved in the information gray and black industry, and seek illegal benefits by buying and selling a large number of personal data.

In a public prosecution case at the end of 2019, the party Wang found a middleman who sold illegal information through QQ, and after investigation, the information illegally held by the middleman came from a masscan software (fast port scanner), through which the computer IP address, user name, password and other information can be scanned and remotely obtained on the Internet.

Wang purchased more than 400 other people's computer IP and other information at a price of 12-15 yuan per unit, and successfully logged in and controlled more than 350 other people's computers. He used more than 100 of these computer information to register an account on the Amazon shopping website in the United States, and by calculating other people's credit cards, he purchased maternal and infant products on the Amazon website and sold them in China for secondary sales, with a total profit of more than 20,000 yuan.

The national law stipulates that "the use of technical means to invade the computer information systems of others, the illegal control of more than 100 computer information systems, and the illegal income of more than 5,000 yuan, the act has constituted the crime of illegal control of computer information systems, and the circumstances are particularly serious."

The founder of the Guiyang Big Data Exchange once said that the black market data transaction volume is about 100 times the legal data transaction volume. According to a report released by iResearch in 2020, there are more than 400,000 black industry practitioners in the country, and at least 1.6 million people in the industry relying on it to carry out online fraud. Citizens' personal information circulating on the black market is transferred to different people every day with tens of thousands of transactions, of which there are generally three data sources.

The first type of data comes from hackers who have invaded major databases, who are in the upstream position of the industrial chain, master the data source and the technology to obtain data, and have the greatest bargaining power. In order to maximize profits, hackers generally throw data backups commissioned by customers into the black market and associate them with existing databases to index more information. The leakage of information such as ID card numbers, household registration books, and itinerary trajectories may also come from some law enforcement agencies or Internet companies.

The second category comes from middlemen who have been in the black market for many years, and with the rise of data demand and transaction frequency, buyers and sellers have even formed a platform for automated transactions, and have even developed leaked personal information for the second time or even many times.

The third category is the sellers who sell black market data to the outside world, who usually package the data into different categories and appear in WeChat groups, QQ groups, and online communities such as Tieba for different needs, and widely distribute the business. In March 2017, in a house in Meishan City, Li Mengfan began to buy citizens' personal information from the black market through QQ, and used the personal information to register an account on amazon website in the United States, and then used Taobao to resell it.

Within three months, Li Mengfan sold a total of 16,458 pieces of citizens' personal information containing account numbers, passwords, names, addresses, telephone numbers, etc., and was arrested by the police on June 6 of that year. Through a remote investigation of Li Mengfan's Taobao account, the police found that li sold citizens' personal information successfully 70 times, with a total amount of nearly 40,000 yuan.

There are many similar cases of illegally obtaining personal information to register and sell on Amazon stores, and there is no shortage of well-processed gang crimes. In a case publicly tried by the Shanghai Hongkou District People's Procuratorate in May last year, a total of six defendants were involved in the crime of infringing on citizens' personal information and forging documents and seals of state organs.

Since 2018, the gang has begun to illegally purchase citizens' personal information online, most of which also includes photos of the front and back of citizens' identity cards, and photos of citizens themselves holding identity cards, totaling more than 710,000 pieces, and this information is later resold from them at a higher price to do business for middlemen to earn the difference.

At the beginning of 2020, the gang set up a studio and began to use the personal information of citizens in their hands to register with amazon's official website to apply for an online store, and then sold the successfully registered online store account and profited from it. In order to improve the success rate of the registration of enterprise stores and obtain greater benefits, they began to use the personal information of relevant citizens as materials, using Photoshop to forge documents and seals of state organs, and produced the industrial and commercial business licenses and unified social credit codes required for registering enterprise online stores, a total of more than 1,000 copies.

Comments

In Amazon's platform traffic allocation, there are two important evaluation systems of comment and feedback. The former directly affects product exposure, traffic, ranking and conversion rate, while the latter affects seller ratings. Because it is about performance, platform sellers will find ways to get more exposure and more praise.

Zhang Zhouping, director of the cross-border e-commerce department of the E-commerce Research Center of the Network Economic and Social Society, analyzed that in the initial stage of export cross-border e-commerce development, most enterprises adopt the "shop model", with multi-store and multi-SKU as the leading model, under the model and platform rules, "brushing orders" has become a common operation method for sellers who open stores on various platforms, and the phenomenon of guiding users to place orders through false comments such as brushing orders is prominent.

Shao Yingdong, who is engaged in cross-border e-commerce, mentioned in the self-statement of "Nandu Weekly" that if it is a shop company that can make money immediately as soon as it is on the product, dozens or even hundreds of products a day, it is easy to have an effect by playing a little advertising, and if you do the early sunk investment of the boutique, it will cost at least more than 100,000 yuan, so the seller is trying his best to blow up the product.

With the outbreak of the epidemic, orders and new stores poured in, the competition for traffic on Amazon's site has become more and more fierce, and some bad cross-border e-commerce companies have further begun to use single brushing, control and evaluation and other means to grab the required traffic for themselves, so that their own products and stores can get greater exposure and higher conversion on the platform.

The cashback model that platforms such as domestic Taobao have become accustomed to have also been copied to Amazon. Shao Yingdong only helped friends and peers brush orders at first, but until one day she found that her side income was higher than that of her main business, and she began to do her own service provider. The work she does is different from the "brush list" is called "evaluation" in the circle, requiring products to do real evaluation.

Similar to American consumers, their rating of the store, the number of sales is high, many new stores have insufficient sales data, and real buyers can improve the visibility and purchase rate of the store. Shao Yingdong also believes that "because what I do is real, I have no burden in my heart, and the seller can see me at any time and sign the contract face to face."

Even if this kind of operation itself is eliminated by the platform, more service providers have no bottom line. In December last year, the Yanchuan County People's Court in Shaanxi Province ruled on a case of illegality related to running points. Defendant Yang used his own technology to develop a network collection channel platform software that can be used by a third party to detect the inflow and outflow of other people's bank cards and other funds on Alibaba Cloud and Amazon servers. Its gang communicates with it through overseas secret chat software, pays a commission to Yang according to 5‰ to 2‰ of the "running weight", and continuously develops offline. Since the development of the software, Yang has illegally profited 1.46 million yuan by running points of income alone.

In January, two young people in Jiaozuo, Henan Province, were also indicted on suspicion of information network crimes. Among them, Qu began to carry out Alipay, WeChat, and bank card "running points" activities at the end of April last year, and received orders from Amazon and other running sub-platforms to brush the flow. On May 7, Li went to Qu's home and decided to "invest" 50,000 yuan under the premise of knowing that the income obtained from brushing single running points was illegal. In just over a month, the two used 6 bank card accounts, 2 Alipay accounts and 1 WeChat account provided by Qu to generate more than 3 million yuan of illegal payment flows.

"Manipulating customer reviews, including directly or indirectly providing false, misleading or untrue content", is one of the reasons why when Amazon closed stores last year, the official proposed to vigorously rectify the illegal operation, violating the platform's "Code of Conduct for Sellers" and other standard terms. In order to gain a competitive advantage in a large number of sellers and homogeneous goods, competitors in the same category will even maliciously attack competitors by purchasing bad reviews. Some cross-border e-commerce practitioners revealed that "the price of brushing bad reviews is higher than that of brushing praise, and there are 300 and 500 yuan for a single order."

In 2021, Amazon assisted the public security organs in Taiyuan City, Shanxi Province, to complete a case investigation of malicious evaluation of other sellers. In this case, a seller deliberately published a bad review of a competitor's goods by hiring a relevant service provider, maliciously purchased a large number of goods from the victim seller's store and then returned it in a centralized manner, and so on, which eventually led to the closure of the victim seller's store.

Performance

In addition to opening stores and controlling evaluations, cross-border e-commerce black production is also contaminated with the last link of the transaction, that is, the performance link between the buyer and seller to complete the payment delivery, and criminals often use the internal system vulnerabilities of the platform to defraud orders. In a case accepted and completed in Guangzhou in January this year, the illegal operation of issuing empty packages in the performance of cross-border e-commerce was exposed in detail.

In a case in Putian, Fujian Province, the parties first "opened a store" through the method mentioned above - purchased a large number of corporate stores on lazada, a cross-border e-commerce platform from Taobao, and then released links to computer chairs, cameras, bicycles, treadmills and other goods that were far below the market price. After customers from different countries place an order to buy, they will issue low-priced products such as bead bracelets, underwear, and T-shirts that do not match the description of the order. Four months later, the gang was seized by the police and defrauded nearly 2 million yuan from customers in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and other countries.

In January, another case in Zhengzhou gave rise to a more informative ordering process. In this case, the plaintiff is a buyer who joined in the form of an agent, and if he pays a franchise fee of 76,000 yuan, he can get Amazon account and single technical support. Technical support consists mainly of several electronic documents.

One of the documents, titled "Amazon Buys the Latest Order Process", which details the specific order process: log in remotely; search for products in keywords on amazon's website; click on other products to browse, shop around, and then enter the store where the order is placed; browse the store reviews; screenshot of the product page to be placed to the merchant to confirm; click to buy; select the address; click confirm; select the gift card payment method; display the amount of 0, click to buy; view the order, screenshot the order to the merchant, The order number is copied and sent separately; the order is registered in the form.

The document emphasizes that the order should be placed as a real buyer, and the exemption order can leave Facebook information after the arrival of the goods to find the seller to return the money, and to choose the product with more reviews, the new product cannot be purchased, because this is more in line with the purchase mode of the real buyer.

In recent years, Amazon has also been cooperating with local law enforcement agencies to crack down on black industry organizations, and at the same time, through continuous seller training, it has helped sellers achieve compliant operations, cracked down on various "riot" operations that violate the law and committed crimes in the process of performance, and effectively protected the rights and interests of consumers.