Combating "professional food eating" according to law requires multi-dimensional efforts.
4,276 online orders and 3,896 malicious refunds were filed.
● The so-called "professional eating goods" means that some online shoppers take advantage of the loopholes in the rules of the online platform and ask merchants to "only refund and not return" to "eat goods", and some "eating goods" will take the opportunity to ask merchants for high compensation.
● "Professional eating goods" does not require much capital or much professional knowledge, and it is almost zero threshold. Nowadays, it has even developed a black and gray industrial chain that teaches the method of "eating goods" and sells personal information and makes false certificates.
● The accountability for "professional eating goods" should not stop in the civil field, but also start from criminal and administrative aspects. Relevant departments should strictly enforce the law in accordance with relevant laws and regulations, and will never tolerate such malicious acts. Those that constitute criminal offences should be severely cracked down and the illegal idea of "professional eating" should be completely dispelled.
□ Our reporter Zhang Wei
In less than 4 months, 4,276 orders were placed on Taobao, and 3,896 malicious refund orders were filed, of which 3,787 were successfully refunded, with a total refund amount of more than 200,000 yuan — — Guangdong man Hongmou’s "appetite" is really not small. Recently, the Internet Court in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province ruled that Hongmou should bear tort liability and compensate the plaintiff Taobao for 1 yuan’s money and lawyer’s fees of 10,000 yuan.
This is not the first time that "professional foodies" have stumbled. Not long ago, in the first case of "professional eating goods", which was widely concerned by the media, Hunan woman Zhou placed 633 orders in more than one month and applied for 624 refunds, but refused to return them. This behavior was recognized by the court as destroying the shopping ecological environment, disturbing the social and economic order and damaging the public interest.
The "Legal Daily" reporter learned that Taobao recently sued a number of "professional foodies" claims.
Many experts said in an interview with the reporter of Legal Daily that 1 yuan’s money compensation is symbolic. The court ruled that the defendant abused members’ rights, and defined the above-mentioned "refund without return" as a malicious act "not needed for daily consumption", which is a manifestation of the rule of law of the platform and is of great significance for building a good online business environment.
At the same time, the accountability for "professional eating goods" should not stop in the civil field. The experts interviewed believe that we can also start from criminal and administrative aspects. The relevant departments should strictly enforce the law in accordance with relevant laws and regulations, and will never tolerate such malicious acts. Those that constitute criminal offences should be severely cracked down to completely dispel the illegal idea of "professional eating goods".
Black ash industrial chain has been formed.
Threaten a refund but don’t return it
Like Zhou in the first case of "professional eating goods", Hongmou frequently placed orders and returned them online, and then just filled in a false logistics number. In fact, the "returned" goods will never reach the merchants.
Hongmou and Zhou represent the rise of a "new profession", that is, "professional eating goods". The so-called "professional eating goods" means that some online shoppers take advantage of the loopholes in the rules of the online platform and ask merchants to "only refund and not return" to "eat goods", and some "eating goods" will take the opportunity to ask merchants for high compensation.
"88 yuan takes the introductory course, and returns the book once", "Eat food and find me", "Go and help me type the link, and come back to find the owner to get the red envelope" and "Can this goods get on the bus" … … Conversations like this are the "jargon" between "professional foodies".
"Professional eating goods" does not require much capital or much professional knowledge, which is almost zero threshold. Nowadays, it has even developed a black and gray industrial chain that teaches the method of "eating goods" and sells personal information and makes false certificates. There are a lot of post-90 s and post-00 s "foodies" groups. Both Zhou in the first case of "professional foodies" and Hongmou in the second case are born in 1999. A large part of the "professional foodies" are students after 00.
Their methods are exactly the same. After receiving the goods sent by the merchants, they apply for "refund only", "intimidate" the merchants to refund for various reasons, and eat the goods themselves. These are the "food-eating" skills they have learned from the relevant QQ "food-eating" groups.
Why is "professional eating goods" handy? In fact, "professional eating goods" relies on the rules that are beneficial to buyers based on the principle of good faith and set by Internet platforms such as e-commerce and take-away. Unfortunately, this provision of protecting consumers’ rights and interests in good faith has been used by "professional foodies" in practice.
"The lifeline of Taobao is to provide a good guarantee for consumer rights. After more than ten years of development, Taobao and sellers have jointly built a consumer protection system, mainly to build consumers’ confidence in online shopping. " Taobao said in the indictment.
Taobao believes that trying to obtain illegal benefits by various means for the purpose of returning goods not only makes the seller lose the payment, but more importantly hurts the trust between the seller and the consumer. At the same time, it also destroyed the honest, fair and healthy shopping ecological environment painstakingly built and maintained by Taobao, interfered with the normal operation of Taobao, and infringed on the management rights enjoyed by Taobao on the platform.
Accused of abusing membership rights
The court found that the infringement was established
Taobao’s prosecution is not only for itself, but also for the operators of the platform. Yang Yang (a pseudonym), a businessman who once encountered "professional eating goods", said: "Taobao is doing this for our small sellers. After my question was fed back to the platform, the second one who received us has been looking for various departments to coordinate this matter."
In the platform autonomy rules, we can also see Taobao’s vigilance against such behaviors as "professional eating", such as the rights of registered members and the rules for determining whether the relevant behaviors are malicious. The Taobao Platform Service Agreement clearly stipulates that consumers’ purchase behavior "should be based on real consumer demand" and "there must be no malicious purchase of goods/services, malicious rights protection and other behaviors that disrupt the normal trading order of Taobao platform".
For the abuse of members’ rights, the Regulation on Market Management and Violation of Taobao is defined as "the behavior that members abuse and maliciously use the rights granted by Taobao to harm the legitimate rights and interests of others and hinder the operation order of Taobao platform". Among them, the lack of willingness to trade, malicious use of the convenience of the refund process to achieve other profit-making purposes, and abnormal frequent refunds after purchasing goods, affecting the normal trading order "belong to the abuse of membership rights.
In addition, Taobao also provides measures to deal with the abuse of members’ rights, such as blocking abnormal orders, restricting complaints, blocking comments, restricting members’ login, and sealing up accounts.
In the above two cases, Taobao believes that the malicious refund behavior of Hongmou and Zhou belongs to the abuse of member rights, which seriously violates the service agreement, interferes with the operation order of Taobao platform, and has caused serious negative impact on Taobao’s economy and goodwill. Therefore, it filed a network tort liability lawsuit with the court, demanding that Hongmou and Zhou compensate for the losses.
After trial, Hangzhou Internet Court held that the specific data reflected in the evidence was enough to show that the defendant’s application for refund only obviously did not conform to ordinary people’s shopping habits, and the reasons for refund were repetitive and single, which was enough to be defined as abusing the rights of Taobao platform members, damaging the reputation of Taobao sellers who operated honestly and legally, interfering with the normal operation order of Taobao, and making Taobao spend more human and material resources to deal with the defendant’s false complaints, causing actual losses to Taobao, and directly destroying Taobao and the whole society’s joint advocacy and efforts to build it. The defendant’s fault behavior violated the civil rights and interests of Taobao and should bear the tort liability.
After Hongmou was sued, he never appeared. Because it could not be served by ordinary means, the court served the litigation documents to it in accordance with the law. During the trial, Hongmou was legally summoned by the court and refused to appear in court without justifiable reasons. In the end, the court tried in absentia according to law, and sentenced Hongmou to compensate Taobao for its economic loss 1 yuan and attorney’s fees of 10,000 yuan.
Create a fair and honest environment
Completely dispel the idea of eating goods
Gao Yandong, director of the Internet Law Research Center of Guanghua Law School of Zhejiang University, believes that Taobao’s claim for 1 yuan’s money may be only symbolic in terms of the amount, but in the judgment, the court found that the defendant abused the member’s rights and defined the above-mentioned "food-eating" behavior of refunding without returning goods as a malicious act not required for daily consumption, which is a manifestation of the legalization of platform rules.
"The platform strictly follows the corresponding laws, regulations and other norms when formulating rules, and the written rules are legitimate in form. At the same time, the relevant rules timely extract and define important keywords in the content setting, respond to the latest platform management issues, conform to the needs of current platform construction, help to effectively solve the new network crimes, help to carry out judicial practice, and provide reference for court trials. " Gao Yandong said.
According to Liu Jiahui, a member of the lawyers’ group of China Consumers Association and the executive director of the Beijing Society for the Protection of Consumers’ Rights and Interests, the court’s decision plays an important role in maintaining an honest, fair and healthy online shopping ecological environment. Although the compensation for 1 yuan’s money is only a symbolic punishment, the normative significance of the judicial decision is even more crucial. The purpose of Taobao’s prosecution is for a fair and honest platform order and a good business environment, which embodies the public welfare value of supporting millions of businesses.
Gao Yandong believes that the case of "professional eating goods" will have good social effects: first, it can make many businesses trapped by such malicious acts get rid of the passive situation, reduce the direct losses caused by malicious acts such as "professional eating goods", and also reduce the indirect losses caused by the loss of customers; Second, it can make consumers come into contact with more real evaluation, fully understand the goods, and thus buy more favorite goods; Third, it can make the platform avoid being involved in too much energy by such false complaints, so as to better manage and provide users with better services; Fourth, it can stabilize the market economic order, promote the smooth operation of online shopping mode and maintain a good network ecological environment.
Gao Yandong suggested that the accountability for "professional food eating" should not stop there, but should also be attacked from more dimensions. Criminally, when the fictional goods of "professional eating goods" have quality problems and other facts, they only apply for a refund but don’t return it, and the refund amount reaches the legal amount involved in the crime, which can be considered as fraud; When "professional eating goods" threatens to give bad reviews, forcing merchants to give up recovering goods or even ask for compensation from merchants, and it reaches the legal amount, it can be considered as extortion; When "professional eating goods" gives false bad reviews, which damages the reputation of businesses and commodities, and it is in line with the provisions on the standards for the prosecution of economic crimes that "the amount of direct economic losses caused to others is more than 500,000 yuan" or "seriously hinders the normal production and business activities of others or leads to suspension of production or bankruptcy" and "causes adverse effects", it can be considered as a crime of damaging business reputation and commodity reputation.
Administratively, with the implementation of the Interim Measures for Handling Complaints and Reports in Market Supervision and Management on January 1, 2020, such malicious acts will not be recognized as "purchasing for daily consumption", and malicious complaints will not be accepted by market supervision and management departments. "The relevant departments should strictly enforce the law in accordance with relevant laws and regulations, and will never tolerate such malicious acts and completely dispel them ‘ Professional eating ’ Illegal thoughts. " Gao Yandong said.