Over 1200 restaurants reported for "photographing cucumber dishes"! Is "professional fake-busting" consumer protection or profit-seeking?

In the consumer market, especially in the field of food safety, a group of special “professional fake fighters” are active. They originally used legal channels to protect rights, promote rectification of unscrupulous merchants, and recover losses for consumers, acting as “market woodpeckers.” However, driven by profit, “fighting fake” has gradually evolved into “fake fighting,” with some professional fake fighters using consumer rights protection as a guise for personal profit.

Nowadays, courses to train professional fake fighters in bulk have even appeared on the market. For a few thousand yuan, you can learn the entire process from product selection, evidence collection, to complaint and compensation, with claims that legal risks can be avoided. When fake fighting becomes a quick, replicable “business,” are these mass-produced fake fighters truly protecting rights, or are they profiting under the guise of rights protection?

Pay a few thousand yuan to “learn fake fighting”

Professional fake fighting has degenerated from rights protection into a business

Mr. Zhang runs an online cosmetics store in Tangshan, Hebei. Recently, his shop was targeted by a professional fake fighter. This fake fighter cast a wide net, repeatedly using false advertising and lack of business qualifications as reasons to demand only a refund for hundreds of yuan worth of cosmetics purchased from the store. When refused, they filed complaints with the platform.

In fact, Mr. Zhang’s shop is fully qualified and can provide proof that the products were not falsely advertised. After verification by the platform, both times the shop was found compliant, and restrictions were lifted.

Our investigation found that, in some people’s eyes, fake fighting has been distorted into a quick, repeatable, and scalable business. On short video platforms, many influencers offer “professional fake fighting training” courses, claiming to teach people “how to make money by fake fighting.” These courses cover the entire process from “product selection, evidence collection, complaints, to claims,” even listing high-success-rate fake fighting tracks, guiding learners to target specific areas.

Fake fighting training influencers: How to make money from fake fighting? There are four steps: find products, gather evidence, negotiate, and follow procedures. Which fake fighting track is more efficient? The first involves low prices and high volume—if it’s food, the law stipulates compensation of 1,000 yuan per case. With 10 or 20 cases, the amount is considerable; the second involves fewer cases but larger amounts.

A professional fake fighter who offers courses told us that as long as you thoroughly understand relevant laws, regulations, and practical points from the course, anyone can become a so-called “expert” in fake fighting. The training course costs 3,000 yuan, and he said he would provide one-on-one guidance, teaching how to pressure merchants with rhetoric and how to use complaint and reporting procedures of regulatory departments to achieve compensation.

Our review of the course materials found that the entire process is packaged as “compliant fake fighting,” but it is full of borderline tactics, teaching how to avoid legal recognition of profit-driven fake fighting, focusing entirely on “how to quickly claim and profit.”

Experts: Some “professional fake fighters” have already crossed legal boundaries

Tang Jiansheng, Deputy Secretary-General of the Shanghai Consumer Rights Protection Committee, said that professional claimants often use the lowest-cost methods to deliberately find superficial compliance flaws in merchants, especially small and micro businesses, and then demand compensation. This is far from the original intent of rights protection.

Tang said, “There is a professional fake fighter in Shanghai who reported over 1,200 restaurants for issues with their cucumber dishes in a year. Their compliance requirement is that cold dishes must have a dedicated area, but that doesn’t mean the restaurant’s cucumbers necessarily have food safety issues. These fake fighters often exaggerate compliance flaws as food safety problems to threaten merchants, saying ‘just pay me some money, and I’ll let you go.’”

Photo: File image

In Tang Jiansheng’s view, the current emergence of mass training has turned professional fake fighting from individual acts into organized, large-scale collective fake fighting, even involving “wolf pack tactics.” “A group of people go into small convenience stores and thoroughly search, and if they find one expired product, they claim compensation. Some even bring expired items into the store as evidence. For small and medium-sized merchants, it’s impossible to prove that the product isn’t from their store.”

Regarding illegal fake fighting, China’s laws and judicial practices have long made clear distinctions. The Supreme People’s Court issued relevant judicial interpretations stating:

• For those who knowingly buy fake products, within the scope of reasonable consumer needs, their punitive damages claims are supported by law;
• Repeated purchases, repeated claims, and malicious high compensation claims are not supported;
• The “Measures for Handling Complaints and Reports of Market Supervision and Administration” effective from April 15, 2026, explicitly regulate malicious claims and improve the jurisdiction over complaints within platforms.

Lu Yun, Director of the Consumer Rights and Product Quality Safety Legal Committee of the Beijing Bar Association, said that unlike normal rights protection and popular science guidance, this type of training essentially teaches people how to profit through improper means, which has already crossed legal boundaries. If it becomes group or organized behavior used for coercion or extortion, it may violate criminal law and lead to criminal liability.

(Central Radio and Television Station China Voice)