The Scam That Starts After the Parcel Arrives

In China's second-hand market there is a piece of slang, “dao shou dao”, which means bargaining after the goods have arrived: the buyer finds faults once the parcel is in hand and pays less than agreed. For years it was an irritation sellers absorbed. It has now become a method of fraud.

A report by state broadcaster CCTV traced the pattern through ordinary cases first. A man in Beijing listed a spare phone. A buyer paid immediately without asking about condition, so the seller photographed every flaw and sent the phone to an official testing centre for a report. A week later the buyer wrote back: the photos had blemishes, so could the price come down a little? Weighing the time and the return shipping, the seller accepted a 300-yuan loss.

Most sellers do accept. Fighting it costs more than conceding, and a phone or a handbag that comes back may come back damaged. That calculation is exactly what the fraud relies on.

The full scheme came out in a case decided this March by a court in Beijing's Fengtai district, involving second-hand luxury goods. Between October 2022 and March 2025, three defendants ran a trading company from a residential area, buying phones, computers and designer bags on the platforms and reselling them at a markup. To widen the spread they used the trick to push purchase prices down.

The mechanics were specific. Sellers were steered away from the platforms' official inspection service and told to post the goods straight to the company. A courier was paid 4,000 yuan a month to keep packages marked as unsigned after they had actually been received — buying time to damage the item. Then the gang filmed an unboxing, presenting the damage as something the seller had shipped.

If the seller refused to cut the price, the gang repaired the damage and sent the item back — but by then it had been out of the seller's hands for days, and its condition was hard to prove. In the instances the court accepted, sellers eventually sold at the lower price. The total taken was more than 120,000 yuan. The three were sentenced to between one year and four years and three months; the courier received two years and a 20,000-yuan fine.

The report also points at the platforms. Screenshots from victims show system warnings that a buyer's dispute rate is far above average, which means the signal existed. Legal experts quoted by CCTV argue that platforms should act on accounts showing signs of criminal behaviour rather than merely labelling them, and should improve complaint handling. The advice to sellers is more basic: stay on the platform, and treat “let the courier collect it”, “add me on WeChat” and “I'll transfer the money directly” as the opening moves of this particular scam.