Liu Yin, who once earned the first pot of gold by short video training, now has to withdraw from the market.
On July 6th, CBN took "Beware of short video training scam! As soon as you pay the money, those "presidents" and "lecturers" will disappear, and reported the chaos and fraud in the short video training industry in detail. However, Liu Yin said that the chaos in the whole short video training industry is far more serious than the reporter’s report, and the reason for forcing himself to quit the market is not the industry recession, nor the unprofessional business ability of his company, but too many fraud companies in the industry. "If I want to continue to do it, I have to.
enter
Liu Yin, who claims to be a serial entrepreneur, is the founder of a technology company in Beijing. She has received many rounds of financing, and one of the key factors for this company to obtain financing is short video training.
Liu Yin said that it was very accidental that he entered the short video training industry. In 2017, when the short video industry represented by Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker started to rise, he recorded some experiences on how to operate short videos out of interest while learning. After that, he uploaded these short videos to several knowledge sharing platforms with the title of "The Raiders of Making Money from Short Videos".
To his surprise, this small video package, which was originally "playing with tickets", quickly sold nearly 600 thousand copies with sales of more than 5 million yuan with the outbreak of short video industry.
This allowed Liu Yin to see the entrepreneurial opportunities in the short video industry. In the first half of 2021, Liu Yin and his colleagues started a series of copyright development for short video training, and began to promote it in the second half of 2021.
"When it was first launched, the effect was not bad, and it attracted thousands of students at once." Liu Yin, who is full of ambition, continues to increase advertising, while setting up a WeChat group to help students with short video operations online.
However, Liu Yin found that the students of his company were constantly being "smashed".
"Some people first pretend to be students, enter our training group, use WeChat account extraction software to extract the WeChat accounts of the group friends, and then use the new WeChat trumpet to pretend to be our staff, and privately add students in the name of short video operation instructors," said Liu Yin. At first, he thought it was a market competition among peers, but he soon discovered that it was actually a series of "companies" suspected of fraud.
Liu Yin realized that the booming short video training industry is flooding into a large number of liar companies. Through investigation, he found that these fraudulent institutions also have obvious geographical concentration characteristics. For example, a large part of these institutions he found are registered or headquartered in Changsha, Hunan.
First Financial inquired about platforms such as Black Cat Complaints and People’s Daily Message Board, and found that at least one hundred complaints were related to short video training, some of which were registered in Changsha.
Liu Yin said that in the local area, between these companies, through friends bringing friends and masters bringing apprentices, a chain of interests around short video training has begun to take shape. They "washed" each other’s traffic, and when a company was exposed, they changed their vests and continued to cheat. From one fission to 10, from 10 fission to more.
Chaos
As for these fraudulent companies, Liu Yin believes that they usually have the following characteristics:
First of all, the so-called "lecturers" in most of these companies don’t appear in real people. Many of their avatars are online maps, but they all enroll students in the official name. For example, they claim that they are official partners of a platform and can get traffic support, so as to gain the trust of students. Some companies even claim to cooperate with a national Ministry, and each enrolled student can still get the "employment" of the country.
"If I also hit the ‘ Subsidy ’ Nominally, the conversion rate can be at least 10 times higher. But I can’t do this, because I am a real person, doing a long-term brand, and we are a formal institution that has taken financing, and shareholders will not allow us to do so. " Liu Yin said that this is also the reason why there are many complaints from fraud companies, but his company has almost no complaints, but the result is that it is difficult to do its own business and the students are "taken away".
Second, in order to attract students to pay fees, some of them will also make false sales with various promised benefits. For example, how many fans students can gain in the first month, how many broadcasts they can get, how much money they can earn and so on.
"Some students look at it, wow, this institution is so good, it can guarantee me to make money, and it can also guarantee that I have fans and broadcasts, so I am moved." At this time, Liu Yin Company, which not only did not promise to the students, but emphasized to the students that "if you want to do well, you have to persist", is not so "fragrant".
"In fact, if you search online, you can buy thousands of fans and tens of thousands of broadcasts for tens of dollars and hundreds of dollars." For some fraud companies, it is naturally a good deal to take out dozens of dollars from the training fees of three or four thousand yuan to help students "buy" the broadcasts.
"The short video industry is too impetuous." Liu Yin lamented that impetuous mentality, anxious mentality to make money, and extremely eager to change their destiny, "Many students want to get rich overnight and become popular overnight, but in fact, they are just ‘ Just watching the thief eat meat, not watching the thief get beaten ’ " .
"I also told our students that if you want to make money with a mobile phone, you must insist on it, you must be professional, and you must constantly refine and optimize yourself after learning. If you don’t have professional knowledge and don’t have enough time cost, if you can’t even insist on it, it is almost impossible for you to make money in a short time, because the industry is already involved and has become specialized." As a result, many students shook their heads when they heard the truth about these industries from Liu Yin, saying, "What you said is so complicated, so I’d better change companies."
In the investigation, the First Financial Reporter found that the rhetoric of some short video training institutions is very watery. The so-called lecturer of a short video company headquartered in Changsha listed several short video accounts in the training, saying that these accounts with millions of fans were all opened under their guidance. "It is very simple to make short videos. If they can do it, you can do it." One of the female lecturers who claimed to be "Tao Xin" pointed to a short video account of "×× Movie and Television" with 5.44 million fans and declared to the students that this account was operated so well under her own guidance. However, the operator of the account reported to the reporter that he did not know "Tao Xin" and reminded the reporter "Don’t be cheated".
What makes Liu Yin even more amazed is the system prevention and control of these institutions. In this system, even some students who have been cheated want to kindly remind new students not to be fooled, and they will find that they can’t enter the new classrooms of these companies. In order to avoid being reported, every class will change the link. "Every class is a new website. If you don’t know this website in advance, you can’t get in." The old website, soon after the class ended, became invalid.
Old students who want to complain have no way to complain, and the complaint channels they can think of are the online complaint platform or the offline market supervision department.
exit
In fact, many old students, including Liu Yin, have reported being cheated to the market supervision department in Changsha, and many media, including CBN and Hunan Radio and Television Metropolitan Channel, have also exposed similar short video training scams.
To this end, Changsha Municipal Market Supervision Bureau has also punished these companies in the name of unfair competition behaviors suspected of false propaganda, and asked them to regulate their operations, but why are fraudulent companies still emerging one after another?
"I’m puzzled, too, but now I want to understand. If I am a liar, I will continue to cheat," said Liu Yin. Compared with the income of the liar company, the tens of thousands of dollars was fined, and compared with the temptation to earn millions every year, it was only nine Niu Yi cents, and I was fined tens of thousands of dollars. Why not continue to cheat and cheat? "You know what I mean, or the punishment is too light and there is not much risk."
Liu Yin also tried to sue the other party for infringement in the name of intellectual property rights through legal channels, but the lawyer told him that similar cases are difficult to obtain evidence, the second is difficult to define losses, and the third is that for entrepreneurs like himself, the time cost is too high, and it is easy to be countered and retaliated by the other party. "If you spend so much energy, you will lose 12,000 yuan in the end, but for us, the time cost is too big and the span period is long, so we really have no confidence to do this."
"In the post-epidemic era, (short video) was originally a slogan, but if it goes on like this, the whole industry will be smoky and may really be finished." To this end, Liu Yin Company, which neither dares to arbitrarily engage in state ministries and commissions, nor dares to make promises at random, seems to be somewhat "outstanding". Seeing that the students are cheated and the traffic is intercepted, Liu Yin, who has no choice but to give up what she loves, can only find another business opportunity.
"(I am very disappointed with this business) and I am preparing to package it and transfer it." Liu Yin told CBN that he would never set foot in this short video training for ordinary individuals again.
(Liu Yin is a pseudonym in the text)
1. Bill of Quantities for Prevention and Control of Epidemic Normalization in COVID-19. pdf
