As if Alibaba’s counterfeit woes weren’t enough, the Chinese tech giant’s e-commerce platforms Taobao and Tmall were hit with more bad news on Monday.

An investigative report by The Beijing News (link in Chinese), a Chinese media company, was published yesterday, revealing China’s illegal market of “empty package scalping” (空包刷单, our translation), whereby shop owners on Taobao and Tmall inflate their sales statistics though fake package deliveries by using “empty package” service websites and delivery services.

“I wasn’t even in China, I never bought anything from these stores,” said one source in the report, who had left China for two months.

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