a pinch too suspicious
On the Chinese social media app RedNote, WIRED found at least a dozen posts from ecommerce sellers and customer service representatives complaining about the AI-generated refund claims they allegedly received. In one case, a customer complained that the bedsheet they had purchased was laminated, but the Chinese characters on the shipping label looked illegible. In another, the buyer sent a photo of a coffee mug with cracks that looked like paper tears. “It’s a ceramic cup, not a cardboard cup. Who can break a ceramic cup into layers like that?” The seller wrote.
Merchants reported that there are certain product categories where AI-generated damage photos are being misused the most: fresh groceries, low-cost beauty products, and fragile items like ceramic cups. Sellers often do not ask customers to return these items before issuing a refund, making return scams more likely.
In November, a merchant selling live crabs on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, received a photo from a customer that made it look like most of the crabs he had purchased were already dead, while two others had fledgling. The buyer also sent videos that showed dead crabs being plucked by a human finger. But there was something wrong.
“My family has been raising crabs for more than 30 years. We have never seen a dead crab with its legs up,” seller Gao Jing said in a video later posted on Douyin. But what ultimately betrayed it was the crabs’ gender. The first video featured two men and four women, while the second clip featured three men and three women. One of them also had nine legs instead of eight.
According to a police notice shared online by Gao, Gao later reported the fraud to police, who determined that the videos were indeed fabricated and detained the buyer for eight days. The case attracted widespread attention on Chinese social media, as it was the first known AI refund scam of its kind to trigger a regulatory response.
reducing barriers
This problem is not exclusive to China. New York-based fraud detection company Forter estimates that AI-doctored images used in refund claims have increased by more than 15 percent since the beginning of the year, and are continuing to rise globally.
“This trend began in mid-2024, but has accelerated over the past year as image-making tools have become widely accessible and incredibly easy to use.” says Michael Rietblat, CEO and co-founder of Forter. He says AI doesn’t need to do everything right, because frontline retail employees and refund review teams may not have time to examine each photo closely.
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