Reported Me for Selling Counterfeits? He Dug Out the Handprinted Receipt That Same Night!

At 7:40 on Monday night, sitting in front of the computer in his rental apartment, he read the notification from beginning to end three times.

Someone had reported the shop for selling counterfeit branded goods. The listing had been suspended, and he had to upload purchase documentation for the batch within the deadline. If the documents failed verification, points would be deducted and the listing taken down.

The report had come in after three that afternoon—three of them, all around the same time.

He opened the review section. "Fake goods, don't buy." Five words. The order had been placed that afternoon, and the logistics field was still blank.

The goods had not even left the door, yet someone had already decided they were fake.

He went back through the orders. That afternoon, there were another six or seven orders that had been placed but never paid for. Every buyer name looked more randomly typed than the last.

There was no need to guess any further.

If a real buyer thought the goods were wrong, they would argue, request a return, or send a screen full of question marks. No buyer would quietly place an order, refuse to pay, then leave a bad review without receiving anything—all on the same afternoon.

It was a competitor.

Among the Hangzhou shops selling boots, it did not take much investigation to know who was hurting the most right now.

His listing was priced at thirty-nine. Genuine first-hand stock on the market started at fifty-eight. That gap in the middle hurt whoever got stabbed by it.

Half a month earlier, he had stood outside that factory in Wenzhou, watching their people sit on little stools beside the trucks and tick off boxes one by one. A six-figure deposit had been put down, tying up five or six factories at the source from early October through next spring. The goal was to have all the fur-cuffed boots that winter pass through one person's hands.

Then a shop in Hangzhou had appeared, selling them for thirty-nine—and they were fur-cuffed ankle boots, too.

Anyone would have jumped.

Heavy footsteps thudded in the hallway. Ma Le pushed the door open, still holding a roll of packing tape.

"Bro, an old customer just asked me why they can't open our listing."

"We got reported. They said we sell fakes."

Ma Le's face went white.

"Selling fakes?" He darted over in two strides, nearly pressing his face to the screen. "If they really shut down the shop, my name is the one on the business license. There are still a hundred and twenty boxes sitting in your mom's house."

"It hasn't reached the point of shutting down the shop."

"We can't just sit around waiting, either." Ma Le straightened up, then suddenly slapped his thigh. "Wait, no. Don't you work over there? Those platform reps or whatever—you're one of them yourself. Just find someone you know and say a word. Explain it clearly. You don't even have to give your name. Just casually ask about it."

Lin Fan did not look up.

This was the best solution Ma Le could come up with. If any other seller out there ran into this situation, that would be their first thought. There were hundreds of thousands of shops on the entire platform. If anyone had a connection, who would not want to ask someone about it?

Yet out of everyone on the platform, he alone could not take that route.

He entered that building during the day with an employee badge, and this was exactly the kind of business he handled. If he went to ask, they could casually investigate: whose name was on the shop, who had sourced the goods, which account the money had gone through. Once that thread got pulled, he would not have to wait until the New Year. Tomorrow, he would be packing up and going home. Dismissal, recovery of profits, an industry-wide notice—he knew those words better than anyone.

Other sellers could look for connections when something went wrong. When something went wrong for him, he could only use the public channel available to everyone—and he had to do it cleaner than anyone else.

"I'm not looking for anyone." He turned back to the computer. "I'll upload the documents myself."

There was only one thing to do: complete the paperwork before the deadline and get the listing back up.

It had already been suspended for over half a day. Another day of delay would make two. There were only nine days left until Double Eleven.

For every day the listing stayed down, sales lost a day of momentum, reviews lost a day of growth, and its search ranking—having just climbed to the second page—would start sliding back down. On that day, people across the internet would flood onto Taobao. What they searched for and whose listings they clicked would depend on the foundation built one order at a time over these nine days.

He had documents, and they were solid.

That day in Wenzhou, after the money had been counted, Factory Manager Ye had rubbed his hands together and thanked him for ages. Lin Fan himself had asked one of the older workers staying behind for a sheet of paper. Squatting atop a carton, he had written it out line by line: payment settled in full, two thousand pairs, ten yuan fifty per pair, dated that day. Finally, the two of them had each pressed a fingerprint onto it.

Factory Manager Ye had even laughed at the time, saying that after twenty years in business, it was his first time seeing a buyer write himself a receipt.

The second item was the shipping waybill. Factory Manager Ye had personally escorted the goods to the freight department early the next morning. They had been sent on the Hangzhou direct line. The tracking number had arrived by text message, and Lin Fan had picked up the goods in Jianqiao on Wednesday afternoon. He had kept the pickup slip as well.

The third piece was the most concrete of all—the goods themselves.

The string of foreign letters on the cartons was still there. So was the seal over the tape. He had not thrown away a single inspection card from inside the boxes. They were export documents from when foreigners had inspected the goods, and the stitching was even one row denser than the genuine stock on the market.

They accused him of selling counterfeit brands, but his listing had never displayed a single brand name from beginning to end. The title contained only a few terms: fur cuff, ankle boot, thick fleece lining, genuine leather sole. They could flip through the page until it fell apart and still not find a second kind of wording.

After all this trouble, he could also gain something else from it.

The fact that the other side was this desperate was like them telling him through the screen that someone had noticed this batch of shoes. They considered it a threat. If he had merely been some insignificant little shop selling off-brand goods, who would go to such lengths?

Besides, making a move nine days before Double Eleven was too early.

Three reports, one bad review, and several accounts placing empty orders—that was all they had. Now that they had revealed their methods, he would know what to expect in the days ahead.

He pulled the receipt from the innermost compartment of his backpack. The paper had been pressed soft, and the fingerprint in the lower-right corner was a dark, faded red.

He found the pickup slip in a drawer, scrolled back through more than thirty text messages on his phone, and found the one with the tracking number.

Taking Ma Le's digital camera, the two of them went downstairs and opened the garage.

When the rolling door was halfway up, the boot cartons were stacked chest-high. He opened one from the outermost row and photographed the foreign letters on the side, the seal over the tape, the paper card inside, and the label on the tongue one by one. Then he took out a pair, placed it on some newspaper, and photographed it from both sides.

"This counts as evidence too?" Ma Le asked, squatting beside him with a flashlight.

"It does."

At a quarter to nine, the typing and photocopy shop at the entrance to the residential compound still had its lights on. The owner was tidying up, preparing to close.

The receipt, pickup slip, and waybill stub were scanned into images. One yuan each.

Back home, he uploaded them. In the explanation field, he wrote four lines: the goods were in-stock export return orders from a foreign trade shoe factory in Wenzhou; the documents were complete; the product page had never mentioned any brand; and the person reporting him had not even specified which brand the goods allegedly imitated.

Once he clicked submit, a line appeared on the page saying it was awaiting review.

He did not turn off the computer.

He also submitted an appeal against that bad review. The order number, purchase time, and logistics status were all laid out together. The goods had not even been collected by the carrier, yet the buyer had already declared them fake. There was no way to explain that away.

He copied down the names of the three reporting accounts one by one, then included them in the appeal along with the six or seven accounts that had placed unpaid orders.

He also changed the item's inventory settings so stock would only be deducted after payment. From then on, no one could tie up even one pair of his shoes just by placing an unpaid order.

At nine the next morning, he was back at his workstation reviewing merchant qualifications, opening other people's business licenses, authorization letters, and purchase slips one shop after another until his eyes ached.

His own three images were currently queued up with another team in the same building. How many shops were ahead of him, and how long would the wait be? Like any seller out there, he had no way to ask.

A little after four that afternoon, the phone in his pocket vibrated. It was a text from Ma Le: the listing could be opened again.

When he got home that night and checked, the documents had passed verification. The listing had resumed sales, and the review saying "Fake goods, don't buy" had been removed. In its place was a new review saying the fur was thicker than expected.

It had been suspended for more than a day, and orders had been cut off for a stretch. Yet from nine that night until closing, they received thirteen orders—more than in the two days before the suspension. The old customers' orders, held back for a day, had all come in at once.

Ma Le sealed boxes at the garage entrance all night. After finishing the last one, he straightened up and asked him,

"So it's just over?"

"It's over."

"I thought we'd have to struggle with this for ten days or half a month." Ma Le tossed the tape roll onto the shelf. "Bro, what were those people even after? We sell ours for thirty-nine. What did we ever do to them?"

"We did something."

The other side's move had been a test—to probe how deep the water was. Now they knew: reports would not work, the documents were real, and the goods were real.

There were plenty of ways to kill a shop.

Someone who made a move nine days before Double Eleven would not still be sitting around watching the show on the eleventh.

"Set aside half a day in the next couple of days." He pulled down the garage door. "Come with me to the west side of town. Restack the boxes by size and move the size thirty-sixes and thirty-sevens to the entrance."

"Why sort them now?"

"There won't be time when it matters."