A 26-year-old woman was recently swindled out of nearly 60,000 yuan (US$9,452) after helping online store owners fake purchases to promote their stores, SZTV reported.
The woman, surnamed Zheng, had been an ordinary worker at a factory in Longgang District before a car accident completely changed her life two years ago. The car accident caused a severe sequela that has left the young woman handicapped, according to the report.
“I can’t go out to work any more. I can only stay at home,” Zheng said during the TV program. When she needed to buy daily necessities, she would turn to online shopping. Now, her family is supporting her.
Since Zheng could only stay at home, she would sometimes seek part-time jobs on the Internet to earn an allowance. Faking purchases is one way that she earns money.
Zheng would purchase items online and leave positive comments for the online store to promote the items. In return, the online store owners return the money she spent on the item plus a commission of 3 yuan.
Gradually, Zheng had accumulated some savings with the illicit part-time job, which made her believe that she could use the method to make money for the long term. However, she was swindled a few days ago when she met a part-time job agent going by the alias Xiaoping on the Internet.
Xiaoping told Zheng that if she faked purchases on the large-scale online shopping site jd.com, she could earn a commission of 5 percent for the first order. The commission would be raised to 10 percent if Zheng took the part-time job and completed all of the tasks.
With an account number and password provided by Xiaoping, Zheng logged into the account on jd.com and completed the first order by purchasing an item for around 100 yuan. After the initial trial task, Zheng received a commission of 5 percent in her online payment account.
She then completed several other orders, spending a few thousand yuan on the online items. “When I asked her (Xiao-ping) to give my money back, she refused and said it was because I had not finished all the tasks,” said Zheng.
To get back her money, Zheng spent 59,700 yuan purchasing items on the website in half a day. The money had been given to her by her parents for her treatment, according to Zheng.
Zheng was rejected again when she tried to get her money back, not to mention the promised commission. She then realized that she might have been cheated by Xiaoping.