Zhou Bin Insisted It Was Fake Orders, but Su Qing Laid Over a Thousand Shipping Addresses on the Table!

At 8:50 a.m. on November 12, on the sixth floor, his computer had barely finished booting when Zhou Bin appeared behind his chair with a thermos in hand.

"Where are the numbers?"

"Pulling them now."

There was only one thing to do today: pull up every last figure from yesterday and submit them.

Anyone could pull this report. It sat in the backend, and whoever opened it would see the same numbers. The difference was that he was the only one in the entire company who had stood outside that garage last night and knew exactly how those 5,381 orders had come in, one by one.

Not a single number needed changing. Changing anything would be courting death. Zhou Bin wanted that day's numbers, so he gave him that day's numbers—transactions, order volume, buyers, reviews, regions, nothing left out. He did not add a single word beneath the report.

The cleaner this report was, the farther upward it would travel.

He had a rough idea of how things would go below. Zhou Bin had made those two remarks in front of a whole room: sales had halved by the end of October, and the store would be gone before the Lunar New Year. The first half had come true. The second had been overturned last night, when the store had somehow made 5,381 sales in a single day. Once these figures were attached to the wrap-up report, more than just Zhou Bin would see them.

Zheng Haifeng had included last month's death-sentence conclusion in the monthly materials and submitted it.

If things went smoothly, there was another gain to be had. Once the death-sentence report was placed beside yesterday's numbers, this store would no longer be a dying little shop in this building. It would become something no one could explain. And once something could not be explained, no one would dare casually set a date for its death again.

At 9:20, the numbers were complete.

In twenty-four hours, 5,381 orders. Transactions totaled just over 210,000 yuan. Thirty-nine yuan per order plus five yuan shipping, not a cent more or less. There were more than 5,100 buyers, with fewer than two hundred repeat customers. The shipping addresses spanned more than 1,300 cities and counties.

Yesterday, the line had vibrated in his pocket again and again, climbing from forty-one to 5,381. Looking at it from this computer today, it was a curve that rose steadily toward the upper right.

He clicked Print.

Zhou Bin was still talking to someone from the next row when he took the two sheets. He looked down for three seconds, then stopped speaking.

"What kind of numbers are these?"

"That store yesterday. One day."

"One day?" Zhou Bin shook the papers, their edges striking his thermos. "Five thousand three hundred and eighty-one?"

Someone in the group turned around in their chair.

"Brother Zhou, didn't you say yesterday that if it hit five thousand orders, it would be lucky?"

"I said this month."

"This is one day."

Zhou Bin spread the two sheets across his desk and read them line by line. When he reached the transaction column, his finger pressed down against the paper.

Everyone in the room gathered around his desk. Some read out the figures, while someone whistled. Lin Fan stood by his workstation, collected the extra sheet from the printer, and slipped it into a folder.

Yesterday at noon in the cafeteria, the people at this desk had laughed once.

"These numbers aren't clean." Zhou Bin sat up straight. "Lin, these are fake orders."

"The numbers are from the backend."

"I know they're from the backend. I'm talking about how these numbers came about." Zhou Bin turned the papers so everyone around him could see. "Look. Seventy-two the day before yesterday, 5,381 yesterday. Seventy times overnight. No legitimate business grows like that. A store selling leggings had its sales cut in half at the end of October. I already submitted the report, and ten days later it suddenly sold over five thousand in one day?"

"Brother Zhou, it was Double Eleven."

"Double Eleven belongs to the marketplace." Zhou Bin set his thermos down on the desk. "There are over twenty stores in the event hall, and all the traffic is there. What can some no-name shop in the bazaar get? They paid to fake orders all night to inflate their sales so they could trick the algorithm into giving them winter traffic. I've seen this trick plenty of times."

Some people nodded along, while others fell silent.

Lin Fan lowered his head and closed the printer cover.

Fake orders were the only words Zhou Bin could still say aloud. The numbers were real—he had just acknowledged that himself. After admitting it, he either had to admit that his death-sentence conclusion had been wrong, or decide that the numbers themselves were fake. He chose the latter.

Last time, he had said fake accounts, gamblers, and a death sentence. All three times, he had made the same mistake. It was not that he lacked judgment. He had simply decided on his conclusion first, then worked backward to find evidence.

Who had fronted the money for the fake orders, who had shipped the goods, and which door five thousand packages had gone out through—he had not asked a single question about any of it.

A little after eleven, Zheng Haifeng came down from upstairs with a stack of documents in hand. He entered the meeting room, closed the door behind him, and could be seen through the glass making a phone call.

Ten minutes later, he called Zhou Bin inside.

At 11:45, Zhou Bin came out with a dark expression. The stack of documents in his hand was thicker than when he had gone in.

Last month's monthly materials had been sent back by the department.

Later, two remarks made their way down. Among the top several dozen stores by daily transaction volume for women's boots in the bazaar, this store was listed; yet the 3C Group's materials from last month stated that this store would be gone before the Lunar New Year. The department had asked only one question: which one was true?

The materials had to be rewritten, and Zheng Haifeng would sign them.

At 1:30 in the afternoon, Zheng Haifeng stood in the corridor for half a minute, then called Zhou Bin over. He kept his voice low, but the people in the front row still heard what he said.

"I took your conclusion to a meeting."

Zhou Bin did not argue. He returned to his workstation, sat down, and began going through yesterday's two sheets, marking them line by line with a pencil.

A little after two, Su Qing arrived.

She carried a thick stack of printed pages, walking all the way over from the women's apparel group. Her heels clicked down the corridor until she reached Zhou Bin's desk and set the stack down.

"Brother Zhou, the complete data for this store. I said yesterday that I'd pull a copy myself."

"Why did you pull this?"

"This store is the case study for my performance review." Su Qing flipped open the top pages. "You said the orders were fake. There are a few things here you should take a look at."

She pointed through the pages one by one.

There were more than 5,100 buyers. The earliest accounts had been registered in 2003, spanning six years, while fewer than thirty were newly registered. The shipping addresses covered more than 1,300 cities and counties, with no single city or county receiving more than thirty orders. Seventy percent of payments had gone through online banking. As of this morning, there had been only eleven refunds. Reviews had started coming in after midnight yesterday, more than four hundred of them, all worded differently.

"Accounts used for fake orders are registered in batches. The addresses cluster together, and the reviews all come from the same mold." She pulled out the final page. "None of that is here."

Zhou Bin stared at the sheet.

"And one more thing." Su Qing's finger stopped at the transaction column. "To fake 5,381 orders, someone would have to front 210,000 yuan in cash and actually ship more than five thousand packages. The delivery fees alone would be 18,800 yuan. If a little five-diamond store could front that kind of money, why would it need to fake orders?"

The group fell silent for two seconds.

"These aren't fake orders, Brother Zhou." Su Qing gathered the papers. "These were genuinely sold."

Lin Fan sat at his workstation. The screen displayed merchant qualifications for a 3C store, untouched for a single line.

The two sheets that had rendered Zhou Bin's written guarantee worthless had been printed from this machine at 9:20 this morning.

Now, the person putting the final nail in this matter was the woman from the apparel group who wanted his store more than anyone else.

Everyone in the room was listening to her. Not one person looked in his direction.

"Then what do you think this is?" Zhou Bin threw down his pencil.

"This is someone sitting on a batch of ready stock. They've been sitting on it for at least a month." Su Qing spoke quickly. "Last week, his listing was reported for selling counterfeits and suspended for more than a day. The documentation cleared it. This batch has legitimate invoices, around several thousand pairs, and was listed before Double Eleven. Brother Zhou, the person who could pull this off isn't a seller who grew up on the platform. This person has been doing business outside it for many years."

She had already presented this twelve-page case study once at a meeting. Her conclusion had been that the seller was an old hand from offline business, impossible to trace, and that was what had been written into the minutes.

Now she had added another piece of evidence to that conclusion herself.

"Su Qing." Lin Fan spoke.

"Mm?"

"If the stock was held for a month, there had to be a warehouse and capital tied up." He said, "Did you investigate the location in your case study?"

Su Qing froze for a moment and reopened the papers.

"The shipping location is Hangzhou. We didn't investigate the exact area." She looked up at him for two seconds. "Didn't your 3C Group take on the job of investigating the store?"

"Brother Zhou took it."

Su Qing hugged the papers to her chest, turned and walked two steps away, then stopped.

"I'm reopening this case."

A little after four, Zhou Bin pushed the papers on his desk into a pile, leaned back in his chair, and sat there for a long time.

Then he pulled out yesterday's two sheets and circled the transaction line in red pen.

"It's fine if they aren't fake orders." He stood and walked toward Zheng Haifeng's office. As he passed behind Lin Fan, he did not stop. "A store selling pants was about to die a month ago, then suddenly came up with five thousand pairs of boots. Lin, tell me—where did this stock come from?"

Lin Fan did not look up.

At two that afternoon, someone in Wenzhou had been asking that same question all day.