China’s official anti-fraud app has every growth hacking method in mind
Developed by Ministry of Public Security, National Anti-Fraud Center is trying all kinds of guerilla marketings to help people avoid scams, and now it's one of the most downloaded apps in the world.
Good day.
Recently, the hashtag "how amazing is the national anti-fraud app" became trending on Weibo. The hashtag content was about an elderly citizen calling the cops to vent that the anti-fraud app keeps bugging him about potential scammers every time his son calls him.
But the story ended with a weird twist: the cops went to investigate the issue and eventually round up a group of scammers, including the elderly citizen's actual son.
That one is just one of the tens, if not hundreds, of weirdly exciting stories about the official National Anti-Fraud Center (国家反诈中心) app, developed by China's Ministry of Public Security to help people avoid getting scammed. Interestingly, the app's promotion efforts demonstrated some of the most aggressive and diversified guerilla marketing tactics that Chinese netizens have seen. "The promotion seemed 'uptight' at the beginning," said one person who recently installed the app, "but then it became all too funny."
In one community in Ningbo city of Zhejiang Province, the local police department promoted the anti-fraud app by putting up a large red banner that half-jokingly, half bitterly says: "In March, several local ladies thought that click farming could make them money, but instead got scammed for more than 20,000 RMB. Come on, it's the year 2021. You still believe click farming is profitable? Well apparently some did."
In a groceries market in Hangzhou, local citizens were surprised to find out that the chicken eggs they were handed with were props and had printings on the shell that said: "internet scamming is so rampant, even this egg is fake."
Also, in Hangzhou, the police deployed SWAT teams onto the street--not for catching bad guys though--but forgiving those who have installed the anti-fraud app onsite an opportunity to take pictures with them. Meanwhile, in Shenzhen, police allowed citizens to pet their K9 unit dogs if they agreed to scan the QR code and download the app.
The marketing tricks only become even funnier online. Chen Guoping, an anti-fraud task force officer from Haigang District, Qinhuangdao, Hebei Province, recently became a viral figure on live streaming platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou often barges into other popular stream and live "duets" with streamers to promote the anti-fraud app.
The entertainment factor is that Chen's counterparts become visibly shocked when they see a serious-looking policeman show up in their streams. Netizens jokingly commented that "those who haven't dueted with Lao Chen (an intimate nickname) are obviously not famous streamers," or "months of promotions by the front line workers across the country can't compare with one evening's live streaming with Officer Chen." On Sep 3, Chen hosted 3 streams adding up to 6 hours, with an accumulated viewership of 80 million people.
Netizens' jokes might be true, since data from Sensor Tower, a mobile market analyzer, showed that the National Anti-Fraud Center app jumped into the top 10 of the global App Store download ranking in August, one rank higher than Taobao.
Developed by the Criminal Investigation Bureau of China's Ministry of Public Security, the National Anti-Fraud Center app was published in March this year. The app works just like other caller id and spam protection apps on smartphones of Google and Samsung. Users can check, screen, flag any suspicious phone numbers to the MPS database.
Data from the Ministry of Public Security shows that authorities across the country cracked more than 114,000 cases of internet scams between January and May this year. During the same time, close to 8 million people were deterred from being victimized by internet scams, the potential loss of which could amount to roughly 100 billion RMB.
The Group-buying scheme is falling apart. PingWest's sister site PinWan has exclusively reported that Chengxin Youxuan, the community group-buying e-commerce platform formerly controlled by ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing, is laying off employees heavily in anticipation of a future sale of the entire business.
The Suzhou-based gourp-buying unicorn Tongcheng Life (同程生活) filed for bankruptcy in July.
Shixianghui (食享会), a Wuhan-based company that prospered amid the city showing promise in the grocery group-buying aspect during the Covid-19 pandemic, shut down its service and vacated its former headquarters.
Meituan’s community group-buying sector, along with other "new businesses", is at a loss of nearly 10 billion yuan for the quarter, adding up to a loss of more than 23 billion yuan in the past nine months.
Nice Tuan, one of the biggest and earilest players, announced massive layoffs to downsize operations in multiple cities.
Chen Ying, founder of Nice Tuan, made an urgent alert to inform employees about upcoming layoffs via an internal letter.
The Nice Tuan supplier has already received notice about the company’s decision to cease operation in many provincial capital cities in China.
While some optimists suggest that the current rate of misfortune shared by many smaller community group-buying companies is normal and reminiscent of previous industry reshuffles, like 10+ years ago for the “groupon war”, and ride-hailing in 2014, however, the downfall of major internet players like Chengxin Youxuan and Tongcheng Life indicates that the industry's economy may be at a tipping point, and burning more cash isn't likely going to help make the journey to the bottom smoother.
Last week we had a talk with a startup company called Oushu, a data warehouse provider which just completed a 200 million yuan ($30.93 million) B+ round of financing led by Tencent, Sequoia Capital China, and Redpoint China Ventures.
Traditional databases, designed to record data, cannot handle big data from new sources or innovations like machine learning or predictive analytics. Therefore the data warehouse is specifically designed to analyze data.
According to the latest research published by MarketsandMarkets, the global "data warehouse as a service" market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 22.3%, reaching $12.9 billion by 2026 from $4.7 billion in 2021.
Established in 2016 by CEO Chang Lei, a former Dell EMC senior researcher, Oushu positions itself as the frontrunner of the sector in China.
Starting with around 20 people, the Beijing-headquartered startup is developing rapidly and has evolved into a company of 200 employees, of which 85% are in the engineering department. Now, its clients span from state-owned banks to international companies, including VMWare and General Electric.
That's so much for last week. See you next week!