The Supreme People's Court released on September 9, 2026, nine typical cases of unfair competition in people's courts. Among them, Case Five involves providing "physical cheats" for order grabbing, which disrupts the fair competition order of the platform and has exemplary significance for the healthy and standardized development of the platform economy.
A "Tap-and-Swipe Device" Sold for Millions, Ordered to Pay 3 Million
In this case, three companies are the operators of a food delivery platform and a crowdsourcing platform. Starting from 2024, the three companies received numerous complaints about riders using cheat devices to grab orders. Investigations found that an electronics company sold a product called "Tap-and-Swipe Device" on e-commerce platforms and published tutorials guiding riders to connect the device with the platform App, enabling automatic and rapid order grabbing through preset commands, which is much faster than manual operation. The product had sales of millions of yuan.
The Huangpu District People's Court of Guangzhou City ruled in the first instance that the "Tap-and-Swipe Device" circumvented the platform's operational rules through technical means, interfered with the normal operation of the scheduling algorithm, caused the order allocation mechanism to fail, and substantially hindered the platform's normal business operations. At the same time, riders using the product could seize high-quality orders first, breaking the fair competition ecology among riders, directly reducing the order acquisition opportunities for compliant riders; illegal order grabbing also easily led to order cancellations and delivery delays, harming the legitimate rights and interests of consumers and platform merchants. The court thus ordered the electronics company to compensate 3 million yuan, and the first-instance judgment has taken effect.
AI-Generated Fake Reviews and Live Streaming Product Link Tampering Both Highlighted
The nine cases released this time cover legal issues such as imitation confusion, infringement of trade secrets, commercial defamation, false advertising, and online unfair competition. In Case Three, it was clearly stated that maliciously "reconstructing code" to systematically replace the core functions of others' network products and embed them into their own services for profit constitutes unfair competition. In Case Six, it was pointed out that using AI technology to mass-produce and publish fabricated reviews targeting others' products for traffic diversion constitutes unfair competition. In Case Seven, it was determined that live-stream e-commerce using technical means to alter recommended products in competitors' live-stream shopping videos and mislead consumers constitutes false advertising. In Case Eight, it was clarified that competing operators who maliciously edit and splice review videos to defame the performance of competitors' products constitute commercial defamation. In Case Nine, it was determined that in comparative advertisements, publishing negative evaluations without professional support and allowing consumers to identify the source of the compared products constitutes commercial defamation.
The Supreme People's Court stated that in the next step, it will continue to strengthen the trial work against unfair competition, improve the rules for competition adjudication, and provide judicial guarantees for accelerating the construction of a unified national market.
