An incident involving the mixed transportation of coal and cooking oil by oil tankers in China continues to escalate. The latest news reveals that the Dispatch Helper app, which is specifically used to track the location of trucks, suddenly removed its tracking function.
On July 11th, the 21st Century Economic Herald reported that the Dispatch Helper app notified users that the truck location function was undergoing maintenance and could not be accessed or queried from the backend.
The customer service of the Dispatch Helper app also confirmed that the tracking function for trucks is currently unavailable, and there is no definite timeline for when it will be restored.
Reports indicate that starting from July 10th, the Dispatch Helper app urgently removed the truck tracking function.
The truck tracking function of the Dispatch Helper app is designed to facilitate the tracking of truck locations for numerous cargo owners and the public. It was mentioned that some individuals were able to trace the tracks of the “problematic oil tanker” within the last six months through this information.
Netizens commented, “Whether they remove it early or late, now it’s removed…” “Not upgrading it early or late, upgrading at this time is tantamount to abetting a tyrant…” “Giving the common people access to tracking, and now shutting it down, too much…” “Too shady.”
On July 2nd, the Beijing News reported that after a long period of investigation, it was found that many tankers in China transport both edible liquids such as syrup and soybean oil, as well as chemical liquids like coal-derived oil. The report revealed that a tanker carrying coal-derived oil from Ningxia to Qinhuangdao in Hebei did not clean its storage tank after unloading, but directly loaded edible soybean oil for further transportation.
In a report by Interface News, on July 9th, a social media blogger named “Gao Jianli” released a video program claiming that through the display screen of the weighing process of tankers reported by the Beijing News, the license plate number of one of the involved vehicles was identified as “冀E5476W.” Using an open-source tracking platform, the blogger traced the vehicle’s route. The tracks showed that the tanker first transported kerosene, then went to China Resources Oils (Dongguan) Co., Ltd. to load edible oil, and finally unloaded the cargo at the Jinlongyu Edible Oil Factory in Xianyang, Shaanxi.
On July 10th, a journalist from the First Financial attempted to track the route of the aforementioned oil tanker through a third-party data platform, but found that it was no longer accessible. A representative from a truck data service platform confirmed that the truck’s route could still be found in an external database on the 9th, but disappeared on the 10th.