CCTV exposes the dirtier side of ordering your dinner online
Print Edition
A NUMBER of restaurants featured on online delivery service ele.me’s website were not only unlicensed and filthy but cheated customers with fake photos and information, China Central Television’s “3.15” quality investigation program claimed last night.
Online photographs of the Shisuda restaurant in Beijing showed a spotless stainless steel cooking stove. However, its kitchen turned out to be small and dark with oil stains everywhere, according to footage aired on the annual consumer rights program.
A woman is seen biting open a sausage and throwing it into fried rice which is then poured into a dirty lunch-box.
A stove at the Hongwei Restaurant, also in the capital, was seen to be on the street in front of the premises and, again, heavily oil-stained. One staff member was seen using dirty cleaning rags to clean a pot and a colander was placed on a bucket with dirty water and used directly without being washed.
Two other restaurants on ele.me, which means “are you hungry?” in Chinese, were exposed as being unlicensed. The Fuxianglai and Sanyuan dumpling restaurants in Beijing’s Tongzhou District told an undercover reporter they weren’t licensed. They were shut down last year but had reopened without approval, the program said.
In addition, food ordered from five restaurants with different names and addresses turned out to be from the same place in Tongzhou. Two people were cooking the food in a 10-square-meter room. They were dealing with more than 400 orders a day.
The program claimed the website didn’t require its restaurants to have a license.
Ele.me said last night it was removing all problematic eateries from its website,and checking the licenses of restaurants nationwide.
Last night, the Shanghai Food and Drug Administration said it had ordered Shanghai-based ele.me to submit a report on how it would rectify its operations and said it would punish the company if irregularities were confirmed after an investigation.
In another report on the program, a number of companies were found to be faking online orders to make vendors on Alibaba’s Taobao platform appear more popular than they really were, CCTV claimed.
They were charging 5 yuan (77 US cents) to 10 yuan for each fake online order, it said.
An undercover reporter who set up a dummy Taobao store managed to buy more than 200 positive comments without selling a single item by paying such companies around 1,000 yuan.
Online shoppers often rely on other buyers’ comments to decide whether to shop there, something the fake order companies rely on to make their money, the program said.
Online scammers also offered to place fake orders through courier companies and deliver empty packages to make the online transaction appear more genuine.
Meanwhile, online used car auctions, which were supposed to bring transparency and honesty to a trade often accused of deceit and manipulation, came in for heavy criticism.
Creating a price gap
Cheyipai, the country’s biggest online used-car trading platform, was said to cheat used-car sellers by tampering with price quotations from buyers, creating a price gap of up to 20,000 yuan that it and its dealership partners benefited from.
Cheyipai hasn’t commented on the accusation.
Online used-car trading platforms accounted for more than a million sales last year, or 10 percent of the overall used car market.
CCTV also warned that personal information can be stolen in minutes when people use free Wi-Fi.
During the live broadcast, volunteers had their cellphones use free public Wi-Fi to open apps such as taxi hailing, food ordering and shopping to view their past orders and consumption record.
Their names, addresses, ID card numbers and bank account details were then displayed on a big screen.
Lu Wei, secretary general of the Internet Society of China, said low encryption levels and safety loopholes made it easy to hack into the information.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
