415% Lies

After Lin Wanqing closed the door, Han Luyi opened Sight again.

The data panel in the upper-right corner of his vision lit up:

[Lv.1｜Energy: 53/100]

[Experience: 12/200]

He was still quite far from leveling up.

He closed Sight, went downstairs to buy a serving of braised chicken rice, and thought while he ate.

At nine that night, he showered and lay down on his bed.

Today had been surreal. His mind was a mess, so he would sleep first and let the backend run a round of GC.

He set his alarm for seven in the morning.

The next day.

Han Luyi was awakened by the sunlight, ten minutes before his alarm.

He opened his eyes and activated Sight.

[Energy: 100/100]

After washing up, he made a cup of instant coffee and sat down in front of his computer.

He opened a freelance developer job platform.

He used to occasionally take on side jobs there for some extra spending money. Back then, though, he had to rely entirely on his skills and experience to sift through projects, so the efficiency was mediocre.

Now, things were different.

Sight activated.

An extra layer of data panels appeared beside every outsourcing listing on the platform page.

The first listing: data API development for a social app.

[Client reputation score: 31/100｜Actual budget: 60% below listed price｜Hidden requirement: six months of free maintenance｜Probability of nonpayment: 67%]

Han Luyi's mouth twitched. A sixty-seven percent chance of nonpayment. He had taken jobs like this before—once the work was accepted, the client vanished, and the final payment was forever on its way.

The second listing: an AI course recommendation algorithm for an education company.

[Client reputation score: 88/100｜Actual budget: matches listed price｜Hidden requirement: none｜Probability of nonpayment: 1%]

Wasn't this basically revealing the whole map?

He selected several jobs with high-reputation clients and low nonpayment rates, then got to work.

Sight's code-scanning feature showed its terrifying efficiency at that moment.

The first job was e-commerce backend optimization. He opened the code, scanned it for three seconds, and every performance bottleneck and potential bug surfaced as highlighted blocks. Code architecture that would take someone else a day to understand became completely clear to him at a glance.

Forty minutes. Done. When he submitted the fix report, the client took a long while to reply: So fast? How many people are on your team?

The second job, the AI recommendation algorithm, was a little more complicated, but this was his bread and butter. He finished it in an hour.

The third job was a database migration script, the simplest kind. Half an hour.

Three jobs, one morning.

His platform account balance flashed:

+8,200 yuan

Back when he was at Dingsheng, his after-tax monthly salary had been a little over fifty thousand yuan. That came out to over two thousand yuan per workday.

He had earned nearly four days' pay in half a day.

Han Luyi leaned back in his chair and stared at the number.

He had grinded for five years at Dingsheng without ever feeling like this.

His energy had dropped to 51. Code scanning consumed quite a lot; the three jobs together had used nearly half of it. But the money was already in his account, and he could turn off Sight for the rest of the day and recover slowly.

He stretched, closed the job platform, and opened his browser.

The message Sight had scanned yesterday had stayed on his mind: Flash Tech, severe abnormalities in core operational data, repairing them could yield a large amount of experience.

He searched for Flash Tech, opened its official website, and activated Sight.

Just one second.

A blinding burst of red exploded across his vision with a snap.

The entire page was covered in red.

A huge warning floated in the center.

[Severe anomaly!!!]

[The discrepancy between this company's public DAU data and the system's estimated true data exceeds 400%]

[Probability of data fraud: 99.7%]

[Related risk: abnormal access to user privacy data. Active scan required for details.]

Four times.

Its DAU was inflated by four times. One billion yuan in funding, built on data like that.

He picked up his phone, searched for "Flash" in the app store, and downloaded and installed it.

First, he scanned Flash's public information: its official website, app store page, and public funding press releases.

The data layer overlaid by Sight marked every set of public figures with "true discrepancy."

Registered users: officially claimed to be 80 million.

[System-estimated true figure: approximately 23 million｜Discrepancy rate: 248%]

Monthly active users: officially claimed to be 60 million.

[System-estimated true figure: approximately 14 million｜Discrepancy rate: 329%]

Daily active users: officially claimed to be 35 million.

[System-estimated true figure: approximately 6.8 million｜Discrepancy rate: 415%]

A red tag hung beside every figure.

Han Luyi's gaze moved back and forth between those three lines of numbers twice.

Wait.

On the surface, 80 million registered users and 35 million daily active users meant a 43% daily activity rate. Completely reasonable.

But Sight put the real number of registered users at just 23 million.

Thirty-five million daily active users, but only 23 million real registered users. The daily active count exceeded the total number of real users by more than ten million.

Even if every real user logged in every day, they could not make up 35 million. Where had the extras come from?

His energy was falling rapidly. Fifty, forty-six, forty-two...

With that question in mind, Han Luyi sped up. He picked up his phone, opened the Flash app he had just downloaded, and casually scrolled through a few videos.

Sight was simultaneously scanning the flow of underlying data.

After scanning for fifteen seconds, Sight popped up a string of red warnings.

[Severe anomaly 1｜App actually accesses: contacts, SMS records, GPS tracks｜Scope stated in user agreement: basic device information｜Excessive data collection]

Contacts, SMS records, GPS tracks. Flash was stealing everything from its 23 million users.

Sight continued digging deeper. The outline of the backend architecture peeled away layer by layer like an onion, and a deeply hidden module surfaced.

[Severe anomaly 2｜Detected "User Behavior Simulation Engine"｜Input: real user private data (behavior patterns/social connections/geographic tracks)｜Output: mass-produced virtual active accounts｜Current virtual account count: approximately 28 million]

A chill ran down Han Luyi's spine.

But Sight was not finished. Another red warning appeared, so glaring that he had to squint.

[Severe anomaly 3｜Detected "Overseas Data Transmission Channel"｜Data disguised and transmitted as CDN image traffic｜Relay nodes: three-layer proxy, destination Southeast Asia｜Flow: gray-market industry chain]

The final piece of the puzzle fell into place.

The private data Flash stole was the raw material. The behavior patterns of 23 million real users were fed into the simulation engine, producing 28 million "active users" nearly indistinguishable from real people in bulk. These virtual accounts watched videos, liked posts, and left comments, copying real human behavior patterns so closely that outsiders could barely spot the flaws.

At the same time, that same batch of data was flowing overseas through multiple proxies. Contacts, SMS messages, GPS tracks—Han Luyi hardly dared imagine what the gray market could do with those. Identity fraud, targeted scams, discriminatory big-data pricing—every one of them was a business worth real money.

6.8 million real people plus 28 million ghosts made up that beautiful figure of 35 million daily active users.

A perfect chain of fraud: steal data → imitate real people → inflate daily active users → swindle investors. And the data itself was sold a second time.

The one billion yuan in funding had been fraudulently obtained, and they were also making dirty money selling private data to the gray market. They were profiting from both ends.

The impact of that information was too overwhelming. Han Luyi turned off Sight and took a long while to steady himself.

He opened a new text file and typed in everything he had seen from memory: data discrepancies, privacy theft, overseas transfers, the behavior simulation engine, the fraud chain, all listed point by point.

After writing it all down, he stared silently at the document for a while.

There was no way to explain where this information had come from.

He needed a clean chain of evidence, one where every step could withstand scrutiny.

Han Luyi began gathering proof.

First, he reverse-engineered the APK. After decompiling Flash's installation package, he could see the database interface. User IDs were auto-incrementing primary keys, with the highest value stopping at around 23 million. The company claimed 80 million registered users—a discrepancy of more than three times.

Next, he set up a proxy to capture packets. He connected his phone to packet-capturing software on his laptop, opened Flash, and scrolled around for a few minutes. The network requests appeared one by one, and he pulled out several highly concealed encrypted requests directed at Singapore IP addresses.

Finally, he wrote a crawler. A script collected behavioral data from the "active users" on Flash's public pages. After running for half an hour, the results came out: large numbers of accounts had highly identical intervals between likes, browsing paths, and active periods, showing obvious machine-generated patterns.

Once the three pieces of evidence were saved, he finally had something that could be put on the table.

Han Luyi clicked into the "About Us" page on Flash's official website again.

Co-founder and CTO: Zhou Mingzhe.

He had seen that face before. At Dingsheng's annual gala last year, the man had been seated to Wang Zhiyuan's right at his table. Chen Bowen had even gone over to toast him.

It was common for VPs to invite outsiders to annual galas. Han Luyi had not paid attention at the time. But now that same face was listed as Flash's CTO, a small question mark appeared in his mind.

Two paths lay before Han Luyi.

The first: pretend he had seen nothing and delete everything he had just uncovered. There would be no risk at all.

The second: expose it all.

Which would he choose?

Behind Flash stood one billion yuan in funding, endorsements from top VC firms, and a dedicated legal team. What did he have? A set of evidence whose source he could not explain.

But if he did nothing—

The privacy of 23 million people would flow into the abyss every day, becoming pig-butchering scammers who sweet-talked you, "customer service refunds" that could recite your ID number, and "Officer Chen" claiming to be Guangdong police.

At that thought, he picked up his phone, opened WeChat, and found a group chat named [Dorm 404].

It was already dark outside. The glow from his phone screen reflected on his face.

A programmer who had just lost his job, going up against a company valued at ten billion yuan.

It sounded like a joke.

But...

Han Luyi typed a line: "Come out for dinner tonight. My treat. It's important."