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This article comes from the WeChat public account: Sanlian Electronics Factory Pro (ID: cyberlife2024), author: Long Er, the header image comes from: Visual China

If there is a billboard with the highest exposure in China, the express box must be one of them.

An online store seller once mentioned half sadly and half jokingly that his store's annual turnover of 200 million yuan was not enough to cover the costs, and the real source of profit came from stuffing flyers for online game companies in express boxes. If you consider the national express delivery volume of 130.07 billion pieces in 2023, you will probably feel that this story is more or less reasonable despite its outrageousness.

On the express box, which is a mobile billboard, the express delivery slip also leaves space for advertisers to place advertisements, such as "Don't open it yet, scan the code to get 8 yuan", "Scan the code to get an umbrella", "Get a water cup", etc. Probably everyone will see them 3 or 4 times a week.

Long Er, a friend of the factory girl who is good at housekeeping, often jokingly calculates the actual purchasing power of the red envelope, "8 yuan can buy a box of 400g of chilled chicken legs."

But fortunately, in his "damn memory", "there is still a post that he had seen on Xiaohongshu before". Blogger @小福是只猫 posted a post to advise netizens not to scan the QR code on the express box for the sake of cheapness, because this is a complete phone bill recharge scam.

But Long Er was "quite proud" of the fact that, as a person who makes a living by typing, if he was fooled after scanning, he could write down the whole process and earn some royalties.

So after scanning the code and getting a "beep" sound, Long Er stepped into this world that few people cared about, and at the same time he had the following narration.

1. Scan the QR code and the roulette draw will be back

It turns out that high-end scams rely on personalized customization, while low-cost scams only require calculating the probabilities - and then letting users play the roulette wheel and draw the lottery directly.

Take the scammed post exposed by netizen Xiaofu as an example. Although it has more than 6,000 likes and has aroused more than 1,400 discussions, the whole routine is not complicated.

Generally, after scanning the code, you will be redirected to a lottery page. As long as you click "Draw Now", you will definitely win a 200-yuan phone bill voucher that is applicable to all three networks. You only need to pay 100 yuan to get it, which is equivalent to "charging 100 and getting 100 free".

Moreover, the merchant is very considerate and designed the recharge page to be very similar to Alipay, for fear that you will not be able to operate it smoothly.

Of course, the trick on the recharge page is also a monkey in disguise. After you complete the payment, no matter how long you wait, you will not receive any information about the recharge arrival.

Because this 200 yuan phone bill coupon is actually a bunch of recharge discount coupons. Generally speaking, there will be dozens of discount coupons that will give you a 5 yuan discount for every 100 yuan you recharge, or a 10 yuan discount for every 200 yuan you recharge. To fully enjoy the 100 yuan you save, you have to recharge an additional 4,000 yuan.

When most people realize they have been cheated, the first thing they do is find the relevant platform to report it, but often nothing is done about it.

However, Xiaofu herself said that she didn't care whether she could get the 100 yuan back. She just wanted to satisfy her curiosity: to see if the QR code on the courier box was a scam.

Because of this act of sacrificing herself for the benefit of others, she is also honored by many netizens as "Curious Hero".

While browsing the comment section of this post, the confusion of some netizens is also worth pondering.

For example, who put up these QR codes? Why was it allowed to put up something that was obviously a false advertisement? And what role did the express delivery platform play in this?

2. The past is dark and cannot be pursued

This kind of QR code advertisement on the express box is not some niche trick. A simple search on Xiaohongshu will show a bunch of victims lining up to tell their stories.

After browsing their experiences of being deceived, you will find that almost all of them are phone bill recharge scams.

However, as early as 2022, People's Weekly Online commented on this phenomenon, and in every year since then, relevant media have reported on this phenomenon.

The media investigation was also very comprehensive. In addition to the tricks of recharging phone bills and memberships at low prices, the Beijing News even estimated the "real probability of winning" and that "the winning rate of express delivery advertisements is only one in one hundred thousand."

Since it has been pointed out in 2022, why is this method still prevalent in "Box" today, with no sign of dying down?

After much thought, I think the main reason why the QR code scam on express boxes has survived to this day is that most people feel that they will not be deceived.

Ask yourself, when we see a QR code on a courier box in our daily life, do we really scan it? Most likely not, because we know in our hearts that there must be fraud. Since we know it is a fraud, we just avoid it, so we don’t care much about the interests behind this phenomenon.

It was not until Xiaofu’s post about being deceived with 6,300 likes went viral that we were surprised to find that there are actually quite a few people who have been deceived in real life.

In response to this phenomenon, the National Business Daily conducted an online survey. Among the 444 readers who participated in the vote, although most of them knew that the QR code on the express delivery slip was a scam, there were still 10 people who not only scanned it but also got cheated of money, accounting for nearly 2.2%.

Then, after checking some relevant information and visiting several express delivery stations near my home, I found that there are two main presentation modes of QR code advertisements on these express boxes. One is the QR code that comes with the express delivery note, and the other is the QR code that is attached together with the pickup code after arriving at the station.

The two may not appear to belong to the same species, but they may share a common mother.

Because most of the express delivery billing systems on the market are handled by a single express delivery company, these QR code advertisements are naturally printed on most of the express delivery bills on the market through centralized printing by this company. On the official website of the express delivery company, you can also search for the official single-sided advertisement introduction.

As for the express delivery station where Xiaofu scanned the QR code, it belongs to another express delivery company and also has its own order-issuing system. The express delivery QR code that I scanned at the beginning of the article also came from this express delivery station.

In other words, the two different express delivery companies have developed two revenue models of "advertising placement", namely, express delivery QR code advertising and pickup code QR code advertising. Among these QR code ads, the majority are small ads that induce top-up.

According to an interview with a reporter from the Beijing News, the price of QR code advertising on express delivery bills is 2.1 yuan per 1,000 pieces. If you want to place it, you need to place a minimum of 4 million pieces at a time. In other words, it only costs 8,400 yuan to place an ad for charging phone bills, and it can cover 4 million express boxes.

Although the interview did not introduce the price of QR code placement on the pickup code, I believe it should be cheaper than the express order model. After all, the express order model can be accurately placed according to the user's purchasing habits, while the pickup code model is simply and crudely affixed to every courier box entering the post station.

But what surprised me most was that the QR code scanning rate revealed by the staff of the express delivery bill advertisement was as high as 0.03%. A simple calculation shows that as a company that places false advertisements, it only needs to pay 8,400 yuan to push the following poorly made link to 12,000 people.

Among these 12,000 people, as long as 84 of them are curious and try to recharge, the company that engages in false advertising can make its investment back.

We have calculated before that the scan code fraud rate based on a small sample of statistics from the National Business Daily is 2.2%, while the false advertising company only needs 0.7% (84÷12000) to recover its costs. This means that the difference between the two is pure profit.

Using the above data, we can simply estimate the profit of the fake advertising company: for every 8,400 yuan of promotional fees they put in, they are likely to get a net profit of nearly 16,800 yuan. Although this is a relatively ideal profit, we need to note that this model of delivery is also unlikely to make a loss.

Therefore, it makes sense that as a very cost-effective junk advertising space, it is snatched up by a large number of fraudulent companies.

As for Xiaofu, who exposed the scam, it can be seen from the text of her post that she has more or less accepted the fact that she was deceived. This is also the attitude of most people facing such wild online scammers. "I have reported it, but the money will definitely not be recovered, so let it go."

One somewhat comforting piece of news is that through the "User Agreement" in the phone recharge transaction information, it can be basically confirmed that the source of the QR code advertisement is a small company called "Kaiyuan Yougou".

According to information on Tianyancha, Kaiyuan Yougou had its license revoked by the market supervision department two months ago.

3. QR code advertising, "Looking back and seeing it again"

Out of interest, Long Er searched a large number of QR codes on express boxes in the past to find their origins and advertising types. It turned out that the QR codes on express boxes also evolved step by step and finally became fixed in their current form.

In the early years, the QR code advertisements on express boxes could actually show the delivery of English courses. Regardless of whether it is true or not, at least it is not a lucky draw right from the start. Whether you learn English or not depends on your personal needs.

Phone card ads, on the other hand, tend to be a normal type of advertising. This may be because everyone at the time regarded it as a new advertising channel and wanted to test its return on investment, so a variety of advertising content appeared.

They even found a way to achieve it by using gas coupons.

But after multiple rounds of market testing, these various advertisements eventually disappeared. This is probably because their return on investment could not satisfy the "advertisers" behind them.

Inaccurate user demand positioning, too complicated redirection methods, and too much user information are all obstacles that prevent users from taking the next step after scanning the code. So gradually, the QR code ads on express boxes began to simplify and hit people's hearts right from the start.

Everyone with a mobile phone will need phone bills, right? And it’s 50% off! The recharge amount is set at 100 yuan, which is easy to recover and does not make users feel painful to recharge. Payment is made as soon as the transfer is made, eliminating unnecessary links in the middle. There is no selling, no promotion, no after-sales service, and the main focus is one-time transactions.

That’s why QR code fraud ads appear so prevalently on our express boxes.

Because they know that as long as the roulette mechanism is designed to be simple and addictive, the probability will always be the final winner - the 0.03% scanning rate is enough to ensure that they make a profit.

This article comes from the WeChat public account: Sanlian Electronics Factory Pro (ID: cyberlife2024), author: Long Er

This content is the author's independent opinion and does not represent the position of Huxiu. Reprinting is prohibited without permission. For authorization matters, please contact [email protected]