On July 15th, the court of first instance announced the judgement regarding an artificial data fraud case represented by Llinks lawyer James Wang. Shanghai Pudong New Area People's Court held that the defendant Harbin Qifu Technology Co., Ltd. has implemented unfair competition and shall compensate the plaintiff Tencent 3 million yuan for economic losses and reasonable expenses. The case was selected as top ten typical cases of unfair competition on the internet by Shanghai Pudong New Area People's Court.
The court held that the way how the Wechat Platform participates in competition is not only to provide platform products, but also based on the platform to build a healthy, orderly, mutual trust, and win-win business ecosystem. The defendant's act of providing a trading platform for fake advertising volume will cause the main business strategy of market competition participants shift from providing high-quality content to fraud. If it is not contained immediately, this business model will eventually destroy the entire Internet ecology and severely disrupt the overall competition order of the Internet industry. Therefore, the court determined that the defendant's act of organizing and inducing WeChat public accounts fraud on advertising volume through the "Mayibangfu" platform constituted "helping others to conduct false propaganda" as stipulated in the second paragraph of Article 8 of the Anti-unfair Competition law.
Regarding the grey industry of falsified advertising data, there has been judicial practices of machine fraud and commissioned fraud. But as for unfair competition cases related to artificial fraud platform service, this case is the first one among all levels of courts. In this case, the court applied the false propaganda provisions and general provisions of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law to regulate such acts, which provided an important judicial solution path and typical samples for Internet platforms to crack down parasitic type of grey industry similar to the "Mayibangfu" platform.
