From dead crabs to shredded bed sheets, fraudsters are using fake photos and videos to get their money back from ecommerce sites.
I don’t want to admit it, but I did spend a lot of money online this holiday shopping season. And unsurprisingly, some of those purchases didn’t meet my expectations. A photobook I bought was damaged in transit, so I snapped a few pictures, emailed them to the merchant, and got a refund. Online shopping platforms have long depended on photos submitted by customers to confirm that refund requests are legitimate. But generative AI is now starting to break that system.
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 allegedly AI-generated refund claims they’ve received. In one case, a customer complained that the bed sheet they purchased was torn to pieces, but the Chinese characters on the shipping label looked like gibberish. In another, the buyer sent a picture of a coffee mug with cracks that looked like paper tears. “This is a ceramic cup, not a cardboard cup. Who could tear apart a ceramic cup into layers like this?” the seller wrote.
The merchants reported that there are a few product categories where AI-generated damage photos are being abused the most: fresh groceries, low-cost beauty products, and fragile items like ceramic cups. Sellers often don’t ask customers to return these goods before issuing a refund, making them more prone to return scams.
In November, a merchant who sells live crabs on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, received a photo from a customer that made it look like most of the crabs she bought arrived already dead, while two others had escaped. The buyer even sent videos showing the dead crabs being poked by a human finger. But something was off.
“My family has farmed crabs for over 30 years. We’ve never seen a dead crab whose legs are pointing up,” Gao Jing, the seller, said in a video she later posted on Douyin. But what ultimately gave away the con was the sexes of the crabs. There were two males and four females in the first video, while the second clip had three males and three females. One of them also had nine instead of eight legs.
Gao later reported the fraud to the police, who determined the videos were indeed fabricated and detained the buyer for eight days, according to a police notice Gao shared online. The case drew widespread attention on Chinese social media, in part because it was the first known AI refund scam of its kind to trigger a regulatory response.
Lowering Barriers
This problem isn’t unique to China. Forter, a New York-based fraud detection company, estimates that AI-doctored images used in refund claims have increased by more than 15 percent since the start of the year, and are continuing to rise globally.
“This trend started in mid-2024, but has accelerated over the past year as image-generation tools have become widely accessible and incredibly easy to use.” says Michael Reitblat, CEO and cofounder of Forter. He adds that the AI doesn’t have to get everything right, as frontline retail workers and refund review teams may not have the time to closely scrutinize each picture.
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Comments
By isoprophlex 2026-01-0412:525 reply Maybe the extreme scalability of AI bullshitting will offset the extreme scalability of running large-scale direct-to-consumer oligopolies, and we see some return to local shopping, with all the positive effects on local communities... one can hope
By sweezyjeezy 2026-01-0413:431 reply That's a stretch. One can hold the view that division of labour is a useful economical principle, but also that oligopolies represent a dangerous concentration of power.
By eru 2026-01-0418:06 What oligopolies?
By only-one1701 2026-01-0414:221 reply Well, it’s either a that, or we took a bunch of resources from all over the world by force. Maybe a bit of both?
Who took resources by force?
For comparison, Ireland is amongst the richest places in Europe these days, and they never colonised anyone. They used to be colonised.
By only-one1701 2026-01-0514:281 reply I’m talking about my home, the dear old US of A. And every other western country besides Ireland to a greater or lesser extent.
By blibble 2026-01-0416:14 where "we" is bezos
meanwhile my local highstreet is essentially dead
Local stores bullshit too, I was at a well known American ‘sporting goods’ store and got an exercise ball of 75cm size (it states on box), it is fully pumped and smaller than a 55cm ball that I have. When purchasing online I’ve had better luck
Caveat emptor
Just so we're clear: are you having an issue with the size of the balls at Dicks[0]?
By kyleee 2026-01-0419:46 I have noticed the balls in my local dicks have occasionally been smaller than advertised as well, I wonder if there is some trend or fraud being perpetrated
By dorfsmay 2026-01-0414:56 Did you measure them?
Did you return the one you bought locally?
By kaffekaka 2026-01-0413:15 I want you to be right, but that requires quite a lot of hope.
By pembrook 2026-01-0414:37 What positive effects?
More suburban strip malls, more fluorescent lighting, more people working mindless do nothing retail jobs for minimum wage, higher prices due to zero economies of scale, inefficiency from every local store reinventing the wheel of staffing/recruiting/scheduling/warehouseing/anti-theft/POS/advertising/etc.
If online shops have to raise prices to combat fraud it doesn’t suddenly turn springfield Ohio into the Zurich city center.
By mensetmanusman 2026-01-0414:28 All we know is that we have no idea what the consequences are going to be after this plays out.
By intended 2026-01-0414:02 GenAI really is underscoring how much of society is about veracity.
I’d say the fears and defenses we had in place for speech online, are having their foundations ripped out from under them.
Most of the concern used to be about government control, and that more speech would be the way to democratize and expand our agency over our lives.
However now, especially with generative AI and LLMs, the primary vector to control the market place of ideas is to overwhelm the market.
Reduce the cost to make content, sandblast our receptors, create too many things to spend our collective energy on verifying, and the outcomes are the same as controlling what is thought and discussed.
An easy solution - open the package when the delivery person comes or when you pick it up from the delivery office. The delivery person can take a photo and act as a witness. If you take the package from the local delivery office, there are cameras and staff, so I can't just swap a ripe apple for a rotten one.
Where I live we don't have the habit of just putting the delivery on the porch for a few reasons. First, it's ridiculous if you think about it - no one signed for it, so how could you mark it as delivered? I don't get the US in that regard. Secondly, most of the houses have fences, so the delivery person can't come to the house even if they wanted to. You're basically required to meet the delivery person.
>An easy solution - open the package when the delivery person comes
That would massively slow down delivery times, especially if the packaging is non-trivial to open/inspect. Not to mention that not everyone works a comfy remote job where they're at the door the entire day.
By bgbntty2 2026-01-0416:35 I'm at home most of the time, yet I prefer to go to the delivery office to pick up my packages. It's a 5 minute walk, as they're all over the city. Might not work well for big car-first American cities, though. I prefer going to the delivery office because I hate waiting for a delivery person to show up and wondering if I have time to go to the bathroom or not.
But I agree that not everything is easy to inspect. Most things seem to be, though. Another issue is not wanting third parties from seeing what you've purchased.
By kodyo 2026-01-0419:49 The honor system is a remnant of a high-trust society. Living in a place where you can generally trust your neighbors is neat.
