Teaching people to do cross-border e-commerce and defrauding 60 million

After all, in this world, one way to make money is to teach others how to make money, and most people who are deceived have a common obsession, which is that they think this good thing will definitely happen to them.

In cross-border e-commerce now, the best way to make money is for newbies and merchants.

Recently, the Wuhan police in Hubei Province cracked a cross-border e-commerce agency operation fraud case. Based on the investigation, the police identified a fraud gang, successfully destroyed 5 criminal dens, 13 shell companies, arrested 70 suspects, and initially estimated that the amount involved was as high as 60 million yuan.

E-commerce operation and trader training should be one of the long-lasting "leek-cutting" projects on the Internet, but now it has been dressed in the guise of "cross-border e-commerce", attracting a large number of entrepreneurs to jump into the fire pit.

Judging from the scam methods, this scam is actually not new, and is even a bit old-fashioned. However, for newbies, the dream of "getting rich by doing cross-border business" still makes them continue to fall into the scam.

01 Routines are hard to guard against

Taking the latest fraud case uncovered by the Wuhan Public Security Bureau in Hubei as an example, the fraud gang first hired several "gold medal lecturers" to record videos to create a "successful person" persona, and then widely disseminated the advertising videos on short video platforms, especially targeting groups with insufficient social experience such as mothers.

The lecturer claims to have been deeply involved in the industry for more than ten years and has rich experience in cross-border e-commerce operations. He can provide customers with a series of services on platforms such as Amazon, including store registration, product selection and listing, platform operation, data analysis, logistics and product after-sales.

Customers can get high returns without taking any risks. It is said that "you can open a store with zero foundation" and "you can earn 100,000 yuan a month through cross-border e-commerce at zero cost."

When you are attracted by the advertisement and click into the live broadcast room, you will see gold medal lecturers holding various certificates and talking in a leisurely manner. These lecturers are either the direct person in charge of several cross-border companies, or have a record of tens of millions of GMV overnight, and claim that the average annual income of their students is around 1 million.

The barrage of comments is constantly praising the lecturer, and some "gold medal students" are sharing their experiences to encourage everyone to sell the courses as soon as possible. However, little do they know that the people at the end of the network are members of a fraud gang.

If you are overwhelmed by the exciting atmosphere in the lecturer's live broadcast room and initiate a consultation, a customer service representative will immediately add you on WeChat. They will then recommend you to purchase electronic stores of different levels (20,000 yuan, 50,000 yuan, 100,000 yuan), and when you purchase an electronic store, you will also need to purchase their online store operation courses and agency operation services worth nearly 20,000 yuan.

But when you get these courses, you will find that the whole course is empty and not at all like what the live broadcast room said. The so-called "hands-on teaching" is just a perfunctory customer service, and the "efficient cross-border e-commerce operation service" promised by the gold medal lecturer in the live broadcast room is nowhere to be found. Due to sunk costs, you can only bite the bullet and operate the business yourself while learning the courses.

After a period of operation, you will find that the e-store you purchased is not profitable as expected, so you consult customer service. Customer service guides you to stock up on the grounds that they need to restock. At this point, you find that the products still cannot be sold, and customer service recommends that you buy traffic to let more people see your store and products on the platform.

After clicking on the traffic purchase link sent by the customer service and paying, you find that the transaction volume on your e-store has surged, but in fact the link is not a regular traffic link on the platform. The surge in transaction volume is actually the result of technicians in the fraud gang swiping orders in the background.

After all your efforts, the sales volume still doesn't meet your expectations, and the money you get is less than a fraction of what you paid. At this time, the customer service will say that it is your own problem, and then give you some feedback on the cases of successful students to tell you: you are not working hard enough! When you find that there is a problem and want to close the store and refund the money, the other party will swallow up all the funds on the grounds of "breach of contract".

Finally, you see through the scam, which has so many tricks that it looks like a thousand-layer cake, and choose to call the police, not knowing that you are just one of the thousands of victims.

According to data from the China Electronic Commerce Association, the number of suspected fraud cases involving cross-border e-commerce agency operations has reached 2,871 so far. Why have the number of cross-border e-commerce agency operations fraud cases increased sharply in recent years? Let's look at it from the following perspectives.

02 Not a new scam

From the above analysis of the cross-border e-commerce agency operation scam, it is not difficult to find that it is a very common scam on the Internet in recent years. It is very common in terms of underlying logic, target population and operation process. But why do people still choose to believe such a simple scam?

From the underlying logic, the cross-border e-commerce agency operation fraud gangs are just taking advantage of people's curiosity about unknown things. First of all, getting rich through e-commerce was a very common operation in the past few years. Although the domestic e-commerce dividend has faded in recent years, it has already planted the subconscious cognition of "getting rich through e-commerce" in people's minds.

The emergence of cross-border e-commerce has superimposed a layer of unknown modification on the concepts that people already know, and people will naturally become curious about it. Fraud gangs have seized on the curiosity of novices about cross-border e-commerce and jumped out to tell everyone: "You can open a store with zero basic knowledge" and "You can earn 100,000 yuan a month by cross-border e-commerce at zero cost."

Based on their understanding of e-commerce and the subconscious perception that "you can get rich through e-commerce", coupled with the strong support from the live broadcast rooms of gold medal lecturers, newbies will quickly fall into the wrong perception that "cross-border e-commerce is a blue ocean" and "buying in now is like making money" and fall into scams.

Looking at the target population, the victims of the cross-border e-commerce agency operation scam highly overlap with those of the WeChat business scam around 2015 and the fake order scam in the past two years - pregnant mothers, mothers of infants and college students. The scam mainly exploits the psychological pain points of the victims who want to make money but have no way to do so and lack social experience.

Finally, from the operational process of the scam, it is nothing more than three steps: creating a persona, attracting traffic from private domains, and guiding orders. However, the scammers have invested a lot of money behind this. Fraud gangs generally deploy from both online and offline channels, first placing a large number of video ads to reach the target group.

In addition, in order to maintain their reputation, the fraud gang uncovered by the Wuhan Public Security Bureau in Hubei also registered 13 shell companies and rented five locations for student activities.

If the student expresses his distrust of the instructor online, the customer service will invite him to visit the company and the student activity location offline. These offline companies and student activity locations are also quite formal, and the order conversion rate of offline companies is higher than that of online companies, which truly ensures that every step of the fraud details are seamless.

03 Cross-border business is no longer a blue ocean

From another perspective, the endless stream of agency operation scams in recent years also reflects the current state of the cross-border e-commerce industry.

According to the "2024 Cross-border E-commerce Industry Trend Report", judging from the revenue situation, cross-border e-commerce sellers generally encountered a bottleneck period of revenue growth in 2023.

According to a survey conducted by Hugo Cross-border on 679 cross-border sellers, in 2023, nearly 60% of sellers in the overall cross-border e-commerce channel said that their revenue had declined compared with the previous year, and 18% of sellers said that their revenue had declined by more than 50%. In order to maintain revenue, many cross-border e-commerce sellers have switched from single-platform operations to multi-platform operations.

In 2024, the involution of the cross-border e-commerce industry continues to deepen. Cross-border e-commerce sellers are facing negative realistic factors such as rising costs caused by compliance policies and the continued decline in consumption power in foreign markets. For example, the localization and compliance process of Southeast Asian e-commerce platforms and merchants is accelerating. In the United States, the rise in prices of daily consumer goods has also caused the consumption power of the American people to continue to decline.

Even some of the more successful cross-border e-commerce platforms are facing endless problems and uncertain risks that may come at any time. For example, Temu, which expanded rapidly around the world last year, has been repeatedly faced with the pressure of tax exemption cancellation and inability to clear customs since this year.

The red ocean background of the cross-border e-commerce industry is already here. Even some e-commerce veterans may not be able to guarantee their own profits. For inexperienced newbies, the difficulty of making money from it can be imagined.

A reminder to all e-commerce newbies who want to get rich overnight: if you receive sales calls from overseas numbers or unfamiliar short videos, do not believe such gimmicks as "cross-border e-commerce with no source of goods, one-piece delivery", "you can open a store with no basic knowledge", and "earn 100,000 yuan a month by relying on cross-border e-commerce at zero cost" and do not transfer money to strangers or unfamiliar accounts. You must improve your awareness and keep your eyes open.

After all, in this world, one way to make money is to teach others how to make money, and most people who are deceived have a common obsession, which is that they think this good thing will definitely happen to them.