Chinese Court Jails Serial 'Refund-Only' Abuser Who Placed 2,700 Malicious Orders Across 900 Stores
A man who filed fake 'refund-only' claims and punished refusing merchants with waves of malicious orders — 2,700 across 900 stores over three years — was sentenced to 18 months for sabotaging businesses, in a reference case published amid boiling merchant anger at the policy.
A Chinese court has jailed one of the most extreme practitioners of "refund-only" abuse, in a ruling published on September 28 as a reference case — the kind the supreme court's case database expects other courts to follow. Chen, identified by surname only, was sentenced to one year and six months for the crime of sabotaging production and business operations.
"Refund-only" (仅退款) is an after-sales mechanism on Chinese shopping platforms: when goods never arrive or are damaged to the point that returning them is pointless, the buyer can have the payment refunded without sending anything back. Built as consumer protection, it has also incubated a culture of exploiting it — vivid enough that this week a vegetable seller in Jiangsu drove more than 1,000 kilometres round trip to Shanghai to reclaim a single refunded bunch of cilantro, telling reporters the trip cost him about 1,000 yuan and was not worth it, "but not going would have left me feeling uneasy."
Chen's method, as the case file recounts, was refund-only first: order, receive, invent a reason, file for a refund with no return. If the merchant refused, he complained of quality defects and demanded compensation. When that failed, the punishment phase began: he placed large, deliberate orders across a merchant's stores and affiliated shops, waited for them to ship, then applied to return them — leaving the merchant to refund him and also absorb the platform's technical-service fees and the courier's packing fees. Between April 2022 and May 2025, he ran this routine against more than 900 stores on one platform: 2,700 orders in all, an order value above 10 million yuan, and 62,100 yuan in technical-service fees alone charged to merchants.
Reaction online leaned on arithmetic rather than satisfaction. "Over tens of millions in orders — and one year, six months?" one widely shared comment asked; others called the sentence too light, with one suggesting his punishment should be to process malicious refunds himself, all day.
The verdict lands in a running archive of merchant pushback. In May, a frozen-durian seller in Henan drove the 1,600-kilometre round trip to a Shandong buyer's city twice, spending more than 5,000 yuan, after a buyer claimed a shipment had gone mouldy; he searched the bins outside the buyer's building for the packaging, and the police opened a case.
The reference-case designation is the pointed part: courts nationwide are being told that weaponizing a consumer-protection rule is a crime with a sentence attached — in the same week another merchant was still driving a thousand kilometres to take back cilantro.