AI Agency Service Fee Absconding Scam: Promising Easy Money through AI E-Commerce and Chat Support, Disappearing After Collecting Upfront Fees

Who Gets Targeted

The primary targets are small and medium-sized e-commerce sellers in third- and fourth-tier cities, stay-at-home parents seeking side incomes, and traditional micro and small enterprise owners desperate for digital transformation. These individuals generally lack an understanding of underlying large model technologies, yet face economic pressure or growth bottlenecks in traditional businesses, driving an intense desire to catch market trends for rapid monetization. Completely defenseless against marketing pitches like zero-basis operation and automated AI passive income, and driven by blind trust in technological authority and panic over missing out on windfall profits, they easily impulsively pay high agency or training fees ranging from thousands to tens of thousands of yuan, ultimately becoming digital韭菜 (victims) harvested without mercy.

骗局怎么运作

• Forging success cases and packaging credentials: Scammers publish a large volume of fabricated high-profit screenshots and fake chat records on short-video platforms, claiming their company is a top-tier agency mastering the core technology of the latest AI large models. They deliberately exaggerate the automated capabilities of AI e-commerce and AI chat, showcasing fake success cases of earning tens of thousands daily with zero manual intervention, and promising exclusive authorization and guaranteed returns to entice struggling small and medium merchants or individual entrepreneurs into paying high service or agency franchise fees.
• Promising high returns and signing deceptive contracts: During consultations, sales personnel use specific scripts to guide victims into signing agency contracts containing hidden liability-waiver clauses. They verbally promise a one-stop service ranging from store setup and AI customer service training to fully automated traffic generation and sales, guaranteeing a full refund if agreed sales targets are not met. To lower psychological defenses, they allow installment payments or provide partial trial operation data, which are actually fake orders and views fabricated in the backend, designed to extract subsequent large final payments.
• Delivering inferior scripts and shell software: After receiving payment, scammers only provide free, open-source inferior AI customer service scripts found online or publicly available large model interfaces directly wrapped as a shell, completely lacking the touted precise traffic acquisition and automated closing capabilities. Some victims receive nothing more than useless generic tutorial documents and illegally harvested contact lists, told to operate manually on social platforms themselves. When victims question the automation results, they stall with excuses such as technological upgrades or account warm-up periods.
• Fabricating periodic data to collect final payments: To convince victims that the agency operations are underway, scammers use group-control software to simulate fake traffic and robotic customer service dialogues, generating fake backend screenshots to send to victims. Amidst this illusion of brief prosperity, they demand victims settle the final payment or purchase premium traffic packages. A small number of victims may receive meager real commissions ranging from tens to hundreds of yuan in the initial stage, but this is merely bait designed to prompt further investment or recruit friends and relatives into the scheme to share rebates.
• Going out of contact, blocking, and transferring assets to abscond: Once victims have paid all fees, discover no improvement in actual sales, and demand refunds, the scam syndicate's customer service staff make excuses, remove victims from service chat groups, and ultimately block contact entirely. The company then abandons its office space, quickly changes its name and location after destroying traces, and repackages the same pitch and shell software into a brand-new project to hunt for the next batch of victims, forming a closed-loop scam and harvesting cycle.

红旗信号（看到这些快跑）

• 🚩 Claiming zero-basis daily earnings of ten thousand yuan: Any promotion promising effortless high returns through AI customer service or AI e-commerce without human intervention is a typical fraudulent feature; current conversion rates of regular large models simply cannot achieve unthinking windfall profits.
• 🚩 Refusing to provide core technical principles: Service providers remain vague about the specific sources of their AI large models, emphasizing exclusive research and development while failing to produce software copyright registration or official cooperative authorization proofs, and even forbidding victims from conducting on-site visits to actual office premises.
• 🚩 Hiding loopholes in contract terms: Establishing unrealistic refund thresholds in agency contracts, such as requiring impossible exposure metrics to qualify for refunds, or shifting the responsibility for poor service performance entirely onto platform traffic fluctuations.
• 🚩 Charging high upfront service fees: Rejecting commission structures based on actual performance, demanding large upfront agency fees, software licensing fees, or training tuitions, with payment accounts mostly being personal accounts or corporate accounts of shell companies without qualifications.
• 🚩 Demanding recruitment to share rebates: Not only charging victims service fees, but also instigating victims to invite newcomers into the agency plan to reduce fees or earn commissions, displaying clear multi-level marketing (MLM) recruitment organizational characteristics.

真实案例

• According to Beijing Daily on March 15, 2026, chaos in AI automated e-commerce training was exposed across multiple regions, where multiple victims paid nearly ten thousand yuan in tuition to learn so-called AI agency store setups, ultimately earning only a meager hundred yuan in commissions. The AI fully automated traffic promised by scammers could not be achieved, and victims discovered the learned content consisted merely of basic tutorials freely available online, wasting their high tuition fees.
• According to CNR (China National Radio) on June 8, 2026, a scam syndicate wearing a new digital transformation disguise revived old MLM operations, absorbing funds from the general public and promising high returns through promoting AI customer service and AI e-commerce agency services, defrauding over 1 billion yuan in membership fees. Over 40 criminal suspects, including a suspect named Tang, were eventually arrested.
• According to media reports in July 2026, an online scam named 'opening a store at home' AI automated e-commerce swept across the country, inducing over 8,000 victims to pay service fees. The syndicate defrauded over 15 million yuan using fake AI platforms and agency promises, with victims mostly being ordinary members of the public lacking technical discrimination capabilities.
• According to tech media reports in 2026, a man used AI to generate semi-original content with a single click to impersonate high-quality agency output, defrauding the platform of 18,000 yuan in high creation subsidies, and was eventually sentenced to probation by a court. This case exposed the true dark-industry face of certain AI agency institutions using technological fraud for profit.

Official Stance

• The Interim Measures for the Administration of Artificial Intelligence Anthropomorphic Interactive Services, effective July 15, 2026, explicitly stipulate that providers of AI anthropomorphic services must provide prominent markers and prohibit the use of AI to conduct false promotions or induce consumption, providing a direct regulatory basis for cracking down on such agency scams.
• The China Consumers Association publicly responded to issues such as false promises by AI customer service and difficulties reaching human customer service, warning consumers to be vigilant against companies using AI technology to exaggerate service capabilities, and calling on merchants to use AI customer service responsibly without evading after-sales service responsibilities.
• The Cyberspace Administration of China issued a notice regarding the investigation and handling of websites suspected of illegally operating AI large model interfaces, reminding the public and micro, small, and medium enterprises that many agency service providers boasting core AI technology are actually illegally reselling unauthorized interfaces, posing extremely high risks of data security breaches and swallowed funds.

How to Protect Yourself

• ✅ Verify enterprise underlying technology and qualifications: Before signing any agency contract, verify the true qualifications of the service provider through the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology filing system and the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System, refuse to cooperate with institutions unable to provide proof of core algorithm sources, and conveniently check whether shareholders change frequently and whether registered capital is paid-in.
• ✅ Guard against high upfront fee schemes: Stick to the bottom line of paying based on actual results, refuse any model requiring full upfront payment under the guise of technical service fees or system activation fees, and recommend adopting third-party escrow funds or periodic performance-based settlement.
• ✅ Carefully review contract refund terms: Ensure merchants write down unconditional refund mechanisms in the contract if agreed results are not met, do not lightly trust verbal sales minimum guarantees made by sales personnel, and resolutely demand modifications to ambiguous clauses in contracts that evade service provider responsibility.
• ✅ Report recruitment models immediately: Once discovering that the agency service fee distribution model includes features such as recruitment commissions, retain chat records and transfer receipts, immediately stop payment and report the case to local public security organs or market regulation departments.