Generative AI-Enabled Refund Fraud in Chinese E-Commerce: Investigation on Merchants and Platform Workers

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 2 Jun 2026] Generative AI-Enabled Refund Fraud in Chinese E-Commerce: Investigation on Merchants and Platform Workers Shuning Zhang, Eve He, Xiao Zhan, Shijing He, Robert Xiao, Xin Yi, Hewu Li E-commerce dispute resolution typically relies on the security assumption that digital evidence truthfully reflects physical reality. Generative AI (GenAI) invalidates this threat model, enabling attackers to fabricate hyper-realistic evidence of product defects at negligible cost. Through semi-structured interviews with merchants (N=17) and platform workers (N=13) in the Chinese e-commerce market, we characterize this shift toward GenAI-enabled scalable fabrication. We outline a taxonomy of four GenAI-enabled threat vectors across the transaction, dispute, logistics and communication phases, highlighting how attackers exploit GenAI to synthesize physically plausible product defects at scale. To mitigate these threats, platforms and merchants are adapting verification strategies, relying on AI tools for automated screening and adversarial interrogation (e.g., requesting multi-angle videos) to increase attack complexity. However, we find several challenges that hinder the adoption of these defenses, including implementation hurdles like structural platform constraints and fundamental limitations regarding the technical sophistication of GenAI. We conclude by outlining design implications for privacy-preserving cross-platform fraud databases, and traceability mechanisms such as embedding verifiable material anchors into the product. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) Cite as: arXiv:2606.03215 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.03215v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.03215 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Shuning Zhang [view email] [v1] Tue, 2 Jun 2026 06:20:25 UTC (759 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.HC References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)