Author Editor |
After sharing the first issue around overseas metaverse fraud, in the second issue of the "Metaverse Anti-Fraud" feature, we focus on digital collection fraud with higher frequency and more variety, in order to reduce losses for readers and their families and friends, and welcome the arrival of the Year of the Dragon with peace of mind and joy.
Although scams related to digital collections have been common in recent years, and various tricks related to them have been basically developed, there are still many scams around digital collections, regardless of the number of court enforcement cases or the frequency and intensity of police-related anti-fraud publicity.
At the same time, the non-compliant operations of many platforms, including the head platform, have also made the already chaotic digital collection industry even worse.
In this issue of "Metaverse Anti-Fraud", let's get a glimpse of the degenerate present and unclear future of the digital collection industry through specific cases.
1 Repeated prohibitions are not stopped, and the targets of digital fraud are rampant
In June 2022, Chen registered and established Company A and developed Platform B for the public sale of a digital collection.
Since the platform does not have a network business license (ICP certificate), Chen's behavior has violated the relevant network operation regulations from the very beginning. Despite this, he still vigorously promoted it through WeChat public accounts and other channels, claiming that the collection sold was limited and the investment could be made without losing money.
Then, in July 2022, platform B issued this digital collection for the first time, and many users were attracted by the publicity of "capital preservation and repurchase, stable appreciation" and purchased the collection on the platform. In just one month, nearly 30,000 collections were sold on platform B.
Subsequently, Chen opened the secondary market for trading, and inflated the transaction price and speculated the market heat by manipulating the account and hiring a water army, so as to gather funds. During this period, Chen cashed out more than 90 yuan from the platform.
However, from October to November 2022, Chen stopped renewing the server, resulting in the closure of the platform, and users were unable to withdraw and view the "digital collections" they had purchased. At the end of December 2022, Chen was arrested by the public security organs.
In fact, such incidents are not uncommon in the digital collection industry, but as one of the more representative cases recently announced, its warning significance is of great significance - Chen was finally sentenced to 12 years in prison and fined 55,000 yuan for fraud.
The verdict can be said to show the harmfulness of digital collection fraud in front of people's eyes.
According to the article "Vigilance! The "Trap" of Digital Collections" issued by the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court on January 17 this year, when the court heard the case, the characterization of "digital collection" fraud was mainly based on two determinations:
The first is Chen's fraudulent behavior, in which he fabricated facts and concealed the truth to cause customers to have a misunderstanding and deliver funds; second, Chen had the purpose of illegal possession, and he continued to withdraw the platform funds involved in the case for personal consumption and shut down the platform, resulting in the customer being unable to return the loss.
As early as June 2022, a fundraising fraud case surrounding digital collections attracted public attention in court hearings.
The case revolves around the "Tonggu Platform" jointly created by the defendants Zhang and Liu, which is a virtual platform that relies on blockchain technology to package ordinary pictures as "digital collections" for sale. They use social media and online platforms to claim to be working with official cultural institutions, falsely promising investors high buybacks and other exclusive benefits.
The investigation found that the platform attracted users to invest by setting up special rules and reward mechanisms, including synthesizing rare "digital collections" and exchanging them for physical rewards. With the popularity of the platform, Zhang and Liu made a considerable profit, and suddenly closed the platform after the goal was achieved, resulting in users being unable to withdraw or view the purchased collections. This has caused a total economic loss of more than 1.34 million yuan to thousands of users.
After trial, the court held that the acts of Zhang and Liu constituted the crime of fund-raising fraud. In view of the good attitude of the two men who pleaded guilty and returned all their illegal gains, the court decided to grant leniency.
In the end, Zhang was sentenced to three years in prison, suspended for three years, and fined 100,000 yuan, and Liu was sentenced to two years and six months in prison, suspended for three years, and fined 100,000 yuan.
However, in addition to purely domestic digital collection fraud, cross-border fraud incidents in this field are also emerging, and cross-border fraud has led to "further progress" in the harmfulness and difficulty of cracking related cases due to its particularity.
2 Transnational capital has been drained
Just a few months ago, the NFT collection sales scam of "Huayinghui" was gradually exposed, and it is said that it involved more than 350 billion US dollars, and the case has attracted the attention of the governments and police in Xinyu City, Ji'an City, Linquan County and other places in July last year.
As a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Grand Duchy of the United Kingdom, REVA focuses on NFT pledge auction business, and is favored by the industry as the first dividend outlet in the field of Web3.0.
At that time, Huaying Club claimed to carry out strategic cooperation with the NFT pledge custody auction business launched by REVA, and established a complete value guarantee system from the issuance and sale of NFT collections to pledge and auction.
However, as time goes by, the true face of Huaying Club is gradually revealed - it is essentially a capital disk in the cloak of blockchain.
Due to the growing skepticism from investors, Huaying Club had to carry out a so-called "maintenance upgrade" from June 30 to July 4, 2023, suspending the withdrawal service, which was actually preparing for the crash.
To put it simply, the operation mode of Huaying Club is suspected of pyramid schemes. Its business model is mainly to obtain benefits by organizing member development offline, and in the name of "digital collections", it has attracted a large number of people to join by setting thresholds, various rebate activities, and promising low-risk and high-return returns. After joining Huayinghui, members need to constantly "upgrade" to get more benefits, forming a typical hierarchical relationship between the upper and lower lines.
In essence, it is still a typical pig-killing model, initially allowing small withdrawals to attract more investment, then restricting and monitoring large investors, and finally refusing to withdraw and blocking accounts, which is similar to the case we shared in the previous issue.
But these cases can only reflect the tip of the iceberg of the chaos in the industry - as long as you take a look at the digital collection industry, which has been developing for many years and is still in a miasma, and is far from compliance operation, you know that such cases may still be only a lot more for a long time to come.
3 Years of development, the digital collection industry has become more and more degenerate
After the exploration and take-off in 2021, the outbreak and recession in 2022, the digital collection market has not ushered in healthy development in compliance operation as expected after entering 2023, but has further collapsed and fast-forwarded to the stage of dancing demons.
In fact, after entering a period of recession in 2022, the industry's expectations for the "Digital Collection Platform 2.0" began to ferment, and at the beginning of 2023, the Digital Collection Industry did usher in the 2.0 era, which was just a speed rush diametrically opposed to expectations.
The official opening of the "Digital Collection Platform 2.0" is marked by the restart of some old platforms and the upgrading of new functions, but these so-called 2.0 versions have not brought substantial changes or added more application scenarios, but with the help of the opportunity of the market recovery, in the name of 2.0, restart the previous bad platform, trying to attract more attention and investment.
At the same time, many platforms announced the suspension of consignment sales and announced exchange rules, resulting in a frenzy of so-called "digital collection platform 2.0" in the digital collection circle.
However, the so-called exchange in 2.0 is actually a unilateral coercive act of the platform: by taking back the digital collections that users have put on the chain and replacing them with a specific number of limited-price collections, thereby artificially increasing the scarcity of collections and causing their prices to soar, triggering a new round of entry into the game.
The outcome of such a commotion operation is also obvious, not only does it have no positive effect on the development of the industry, but makes digital collections become a pure speculative tool, and of course, the losses suffered by the receivers are naturally more serious.
The chaos of "digital collection platform 2.0" has not yet completely ended, and the rise of another wave of "personal digital collection platform" has made the development of the industry worse-the so-called "personal digital collection platform", that is, some digital collection platforms that operate in their personal capacity without formal enterprise registration, corresponding qualifications, and no credit protection.
The representative of this round of chaos is "ant NFT".
With a large number of marketing, it has gained tens of thousands of hits in a short period of time, and attracted many imitators, a large number of insiders use the ready-made digital collection platform code, quickly deploy online, forming a batch copying, rapid online model, at the same time, it is also like "ant NFT" in the name of the side ball, touching well-known platforms or brands.
These unveiled challenges to law and morality have undoubtedly further lowered the lower limit of the industry, and after this round of "personal data collection platform" boom, the chaos in the industry has further intensified:
Formal platforms and truly innovative and valuable digital collections have been overwhelmed by inferior platforms and speculation, and "digital collections" have become completely synonymous with scams.
However, the industry environment has not been denied by the Tailai, following the "Digital Collection Platform 2.0" operation of Pill Card and Eighteen Digital Collections, Bigverse and other head platforms also began to forcibly replace user collections in the middle of last year, and such operations also led to a sharp plunge in the market value of the two platforms, triggering strong dissatisfaction and rights protection actions of users.
The relevant rights protection incidents were also reported by the Shanghai News Comprehensive Channel, but even so, the digital collection platform will only give a replies that avoid the important and trivial, indicating that its operation is compliant, and everything is subject to the investigation results of the law enforcement agencies.
In fact, this also reflects a helpless reality: even if a large number of rights are protected, it is difficult to affect the normal operation of the platform unless the platform actively runs away.
It can be said that whether it is a large and medium-sized platform with a certain reputation, or a "pheasant" platform that has decided to run away since its birth, the current chaos in the digital collection industry is still only a lot more than the early stage of development, and many non-compliant operations are becoming more and more intensified in the so-called "update iteration".
On the one hand, the compliance platform cannot be relied on and it is difficult to rely on the boundaries for reasonable exploration, thus gradually losing its activity and innovation;
Only by improving relevant laws and regulations, strengthening industry supervision, and promoting the healthy development of the industry with the compliance of the head platform can digital collections truly return to a reasonable value range, thereby continuously reducing the living space of related scams.
As the most chaotic but indispensable part of the metaverse, the rational development of the digital collection industry can be said to have a long way to go.