Recently, on the Chinese mainland, an e-commerce platform introduced a “refund without return” service, which some buyers exploited to deceive sellers and walk away with goods. Ms. Shi, a shop owner in Guangzhou, recently posted a video exposing how she was scammed of over 50,000 yuan within half a year by the same buyer through the “refund without return” policy, involving 225 deliveries.
In her video released on December 1, as reported by the Xiaoxiang Morning Post on December 4, Ms. Shi expressed, “I’ve come across many ‘wool shaving’ incidents on Douyin, but I’ve never encountered such a malicious case before.”
Ms. Shi revealed that Ms. Liu from Yantai, Shandong, had scammed 225 items within half a year using the “refund without return” policy, selling these goods at low prices on Xianyu and Douyin fan groups, accumulating a fraudulent amount of 54,267.25 yuan.
Ms. Shi disclosed that she discovered the scam when the buyer would purchase a variety of goods from her store, ranging from a few yuan to hundreds or even thousands of yuan. Before the courier was signed for, the buyer would apply for a refund on the expensive items claiming to “intercept the delivery”, then tear off the address label from the cheap items, stick it onto the expensive items, and return the cheap items as if they were the expensive ones.
Ms. Shi mentioned that ordinarily, consumers would not have access to “intercepting couriers”, indicating collusion either between the buyer and the courier or the local station. Since her warehouse did not routinely check intercepted deliveries, she did not notice the scam until recently when the buyer made a mistake in pasting the address label, revealing the loophole in the scheme that had been ongoing for half a year.
Reportedly, Ms. Shi is not the only seller who fell victim to this deception. After Ms. Shi exposed the case online, she received messages from several other sellers claiming to have possibly encountered the same buyer.
Ms. Shi stated that the buyer had transferred money to her after the incident, seeking forgiveness, but she declined. She believes that adults should take responsibility for their actions.