A takeout box contained nothing but a bottle of water and one yuan. The seal hadn’t even been broken. The next day, another review appeared under that order anyway. The ingredients weren’t fresh, and I got diarrhea after eating.
The water was untouched, the money was still there, and all I’d eaten was thin air. This is the evidence-gathering method that Mr. Zhang, the owner of a barbecue restaurant in Zhengzhou, worked out for himself. This spring, he took out a 600,000-yuan loan to open his restaurant. In less than two months, its rating fell from 4.8 to 4.3, and daily sales plunged from over 10,000 yuan to just 500 or 600. In June, he joined a new franchise and tried to start over. During the Dragon Boat Festival holiday, the exact same script played out all over again.
The people targeting him had a clear price list. A reporter from “Xiaoli Helps” posed as a customer and contacted them. They offered three packages: 450 yuan to push a restaurant down the rankings, 1,890 yuan to send it to the bottom, and 2,700 yuan to wipe out all its store data, leaving the merchant with no choice but to “relaunch the store.” In private messages, they claimed to have already taken down more than 80 businesses. They also threatened to report anyone who dared resist to the fire department, the market regulator, and the tax authorities. Those claims came from the group itself; I can’t verify whether they’re true.
What really sends a chill down your spine is that the whole operation stays within the rules.
Those negative reviews were almost never one-star reviews. They were all four stars. In the platform’s risk-control model, four stars count as a positive review, even though the text was full of complaints like “the meat skewers were dry and tough,” “there was a strange smell,” and “I got diarrhea.” The early risk-control system only blocked clusters of one-star reviews posted within a short period. It never cross-checked four-star ratings against the written comments. The orders were real, and the accounts were verified with real names. Every step—placing the order, paying, preparing the food, and delivering it—was documented. Mr. Zhang submitted a full video recording when he appealed, but customer service replied that the order process was genuine, so they couldn’t determine that the reviews were malicious and couldn’t delete them. He appealed more than once over the course of two months. Every appeal failed.
My take is that every step of this operation complies with the rules. You can’t catch them out by looking at any one part in isolation, but put all the parts together and they can kill a business. Those who play by the rules prepare orders and fulfill them as required. The attackers, meanwhile, have studied the rules themselves.
The crypto world plays the same movie every day. A sandwich attack wedges a trade between two otherwise legitimate orders. Every trade is legal; the people who lose out are those waiting in line at a given price. A Sybil attack splits one person into 10,000 addresses, each of which looks like an independent user. The solution in the on-chain world is to write the rules into code and enforce them automatically: prices set by liquidity pools, settlements handled by smart contracts, and no loophole for human appeals. The food-delivery platforms are still relying on manual reviews. A single “the account is verified with a real name” is enough to shut a merchant with a complete evidence trail out in the cold. One more thing: the channels used to pay for these illicit services have changed several times over the years, from phone top-up cards to social-media red packets, and then to stablecoins. The harder something is to trace, the more the criminal underworld shifts its business there.
There’s one thing I still haven’t figured out. After the Dragon Boat Festival, did any more negative reviews come in? Did any of the three departments named in the threats actually show up? The media never reported on it again. I don’t know whether the story was suppressed or whether nobody simply followed up.
A 600,000-yuan loan. Two months. 2,700 yuan. Negative reviews were once one of the few weapons ordinary people had. Now that weapon has a set price and is sitting on the shelf.
$BTC $USDT $ETH
#职业差评 #网络黑产 #外卖平台 #区块链 #cryptocurrency
The water was untouched, the money was still there, and all I’d eaten was thin air. This is the evidence-gathering method that Mr. Zhang, the owner of a barbecue restaurant in Zhengzhou, worked out for himself. This spring, he took out a 600,000-yuan loan to open his restaurant. In less than two months, its rating fell from 4.8 to 4.3, and daily sales plunged from over 10,000 yuan to just 500 or 600. In June, he joined a new franchise and tried to start over. During the Dragon Boat Festival holiday, the exact same script played out all over again.
The people targeting him had a clear price list. A reporter from “Xiaoli Helps” posed as a customer and contacted them. They offered three packages: 450 yuan to push a restaurant down the rankings, 1,890 yuan to send it to the bottom, and 2,700 yuan to wipe out all its store data, leaving the merchant with no choice but to “relaunch the store.” In private messages, they claimed to have already taken down more than 80 businesses. They also threatened to report anyone who dared resist to the fire department, the market regulator, and the tax authorities. Those claims came from the group itself; I can’t verify whether they’re true.
What really sends a chill down your spine is that the whole operation stays within the rules.
Those negative reviews were almost never one-star reviews. They were all four stars. In the platform’s risk-control model, four stars count as a positive review, even though the text was full of complaints like “the meat skewers were dry and tough,” “there was a strange smell,” and “I got diarrhea.” The early risk-control system only blocked clusters of one-star reviews posted within a short period. It never cross-checked four-star ratings against the written comments. The orders were real, and the accounts were verified with real names. Every step—placing the order, paying, preparing the food, and delivering it—was documented. Mr. Zhang submitted a full video recording when he appealed, but customer service replied that the order process was genuine, so they couldn’t determine that the reviews were malicious and couldn’t delete them. He appealed more than once over the course of two months. Every appeal failed.
My take is that every step of this operation complies with the rules. You can’t catch them out by looking at any one part in isolation, but put all the parts together and they can kill a business. Those who play by the rules prepare orders and fulfill them as required. The attackers, meanwhile, have studied the rules themselves.
The crypto world plays the same movie every day. A sandwich attack wedges a trade between two otherwise legitimate orders. Every trade is legal; the people who lose out are those waiting in line at a given price. A Sybil attack splits one person into 10,000 addresses, each of which looks like an independent user. The solution in the on-chain world is to write the rules into code and enforce them automatically: prices set by liquidity pools, settlements handled by smart contracts, and no loophole for human appeals. The food-delivery platforms are still relying on manual reviews. A single “the account is verified with a real name” is enough to shut a merchant with a complete evidence trail out in the cold. One more thing: the channels used to pay for these illicit services have changed several times over the years, from phone top-up cards to social-media red packets, and then to stablecoins. The harder something is to trace, the more the criminal underworld shifts its business there.
There’s one thing I still haven’t figured out. After the Dragon Boat Festival, did any more negative reviews come in? Did any of the three departments named in the threats actually show up? The media never reported on it again. I don’t know whether the story was suppressed or whether nobody simply followed up.
A 600,000-yuan loan. Two months. 2,700 yuan. Negative reviews were once one of the few weapons ordinary people had. Now that weapon has a set price and is sitting on the shelf.
$BTC $USDT $ETH
#职业差评 #网络黑产 #外卖平台 #区块链 #cryptocurrency