AI Negative Public Opinion Extortion - AI Batch Generation of False Enterprise Bad Reviews Followed by Extortion of Post Deletion Fees

Who Gets Targeted

The victims are small and medium-sized enterprises and chain brands with annual revenues ranging from millions to hundreds of millions of yuan, especially companies undergoing financing, IPO counseling, key bidding periods, or the eve of major e-commerce promotions. What these enterprises fear most is not the bad reviews themselves, but the top two pages of search results being occupied by negative content, leading to the loss of investors, clients, and consumers. Managers generally lack experience in handling public opinion and worry that reporting to the police will slow down their pace and cause them to miss business opportunities, leading them to privately transfer money with the mindset of paying to avert disaster. As a result, the perpetrators collect the money, switch accounts, and launch another round, forming a recurring cycle of exploitation. Some enterprises are also induced to sign seemingly formal reputation management service contracts, packaging extortion as normal commercial transactions and creating obstacles for subsequent rights protection and evidence gathering.

骗局怎么运作

• Step 1: Target selection. The gray industry uses crawlers to screen lists of enterprises currently undergoing financing, bidding, or promotional periods, prioritizing small and medium-sized companies that are sensitive to public reputation and have weak legal teams, while collecting their business registration information and litigation records as source materials.
• Step 2: AI batch article generation. Enterprise names, executive titles, and fabricated plots regarding quality incidents, unpaid wages, and fraudulent behavior are plugged into prompt templates, generating dozens of articles and bad reviews with varying wording within seconds, seemingly written by different eyewitnesses, which are then distributed to self-media accounts, forums, and review sections.
• Step 3: Traffic boosting and ranking manipulation. Mutual promotion groups and cheap external links are used to push these contents to the top of search results, causing enterprises to discover overwhelming negative information during self-audits or client warnings, thereby creating psychological panic.
• Step 4: Impersonating a third party for contact. The standard script typically is: 'I am a public opinion optimization consultant. We have monitored a large amount of negative information about your company online. Failing to handle it promptly will affect your partnerships and financing. We can legally delete and suppress it.'
• Step 5: Quotation and harvesting. Charging ranges from thousands to tens of thousands of yuan per deleted post, or hundreds of thousands for annual suppression packages. They claim to have internal channels with major platforms, and after receiving payment, they delete the content they published themselves to fulfill the contract, while the entire account matrix remains in their hands.
• Step 6: Rebranding and repeated attacks. A few months later, they switch account identities, repeatedly publish negative content, and demand money again, forming a long-term cash cow out of the paid enterprise until the enterprise calls the police or the police trace the clues and dismantle the gang.

红旗信号（看到这些快跑）

• 🚩 Negative content is highly templated, with multiple articles sharing identical structures, changing only the enterprise name and details, and published intensively within a few days—clearly not genuine consumer experiences.
• 🚩 The other party takes the initiative to contact you, precisely knows the list of negative links, and urges payment within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, creating a sense of urgency that missing the window means deletion will become impossible.
• 🚩 Claims to have internal relationships with platforms to guarantee deletion and 100% removal of negative content. Legitimate service agencies do not make absolute promises, nor do they promise to delete third-party content from unknown sources.
• 🚩 Requires money transfers to personal accounts or unrelated trading and consulting companies, fails to issue proper invoices, or issues invoices under consulting or advisory fees to mask the essence of post deletion.
• 🚩 Quotations are tied to the volume of negative content and are negotiable; as soon as one batch is deleted, new negative content pops up, indicating that the publisher and the money collector are the same group.
• 🚩 Refuses to provide instructions on the evidence collection and handling process for negative content, emphasizing only that payment must be made before operation, leaving the enterprise no time to appeal to the official platform.

真实案例

• In a recent special operation cracking down on online slanderers targeting enterprises, Shanghai police reported that a gang used AI tools to fabricate false enterprise-related articles and extorted 2.3 million yuan in so-called consulting and deletion fees from victimized enterprises. Case details were disclosed through official channels, and the suspects have been dealt with according to law.
• In the same batch of reports, another criminal gang was found hiring internet trolls on social platforms to publish over a thousand fake bad reviews to maliciously defame competitor enterprises and seize market share by smearing rivals. The police determined that this severely disrupted market order and filed a case for investigation.
• In May 2025, the review platform Trustpilot released its annual trust report, disclosing that it removed a total of 4.5 million fake reviews in 2024, accounting for 7.4 percent of the total reviews submitted that year, indicating that fake reviews in the AI era have become a globalized, large-scale problem, which indirectly provides a survival space for the post-deletion gray industry.

Official Stance

• Starting in 2025, Shanghai police launched a special operation to crack down on online slanderers targeting enterprises. Official reports explicitly categorized the use of AI to fabricate false enterprise-related information and extort post-deletion fees as public opinion extortion, concentrating efforts to solve these cases.
• The 'Provisions on the Administration of Generative Artificial Intelligence Content Identification', released by the Cyberspace Administration of China and other departments, took effect on September 1, 2025, requiring prominent identification of AI-generated content, providing a regulatory tool for identifying batch AI-generated negative drafts.
• In March 2026, the Italian antitrust regulatory authority fined the review platform Trustpilot and its subsidiary 4 million euros for failing to adequately verify the authenticity of reviews, demonstrating that global regulators are tightening the fake review industry chain.
• In recent years, the Cyberspace Administration of China has continuously carried out the 'Qinglang' series of special rectifications for the enterprise-related online environment, explicitly targeting marketing accounts and self-media that extort enterprises under the guise of negative public opinion.

How to Protect Yourself

• ✅ Upon discovering batch negative content, conduct evidence collection first. Use notarization or timestamp tools to secure links, publishing accounts, and content, and determine whether they are batch-generated AI template drafts to preserve evidence for police reports and platform complaints.
• ✅ Submit infringement and false information complaints through official platform appeal channels. Do not privately contact so-called deletion consultants; any proactive deletion service must be regarded as an extortion-associated party.
• ✅ Report the case to the local public security cybersecurity department or anti-fraud hotline. There are already multiple conviction precedents for public opinion extortion. Transfer records and chat logs are key evidence; the earlier you report, the more effectively you can block the gang from changing accounts and repeating attacks.
• ✅ Conduct internal self-audits at the contract level. Any public relations service provider that promises 100% deletion of negative content or requires payment to individuals or unrelated companies must be rejected, and legal counsel should be engaged to review red-line clauses.
• ✅ Establish normalized public opinion monitoring, proactively deploying defenses before key nodes such as financing, bidding, and major promotions, so that the gray industry misses the optimal window to manufacture panic.