Recently, a group of mysterious merchants has emerged on the Taobao platform, claiming to help borrowers "rescue insufficient comprehensive scores." Their services cover major mainstream lending platforms, offering operations to open new credit lines or increase existing ones.
According to observations, numerous shops provide such services, priced around 20 yuan. What exactly is this business? Do the sellers truly possess extraordinary capabilities, or are they merely collecting an "IQ tax"?
01 Individual Sellers' "Convenience Service Activities" Shops selling such services on Taobao are mostly opened in the name of individuals, with names often containing terms like "Technology Studio," "Technology Center," or "Network Technology Services." This setup is to package the services as "convenience service activities" or "small sporadic transactions," as according to e-commerce laws and regulations, individuals engaging in such activities do not require market entity registration.
The product titles for these services are largely similar, typically simply listing common online lending brands, making it hard to discern the specifics. Some sellers include phrases like "rescue insufficient comprehensive scores" in product images, but these are often subtle.
The real service content is revealed upon entering the product page through buyer reviews: "XXX successfully opened a line and only confirmed receipt afterward; the seller indeed has skills," "XXX successfully increased the limit, absolutely amazing," etc. Some reviews even include screenshots of credit limits from relevant lending platforms.
When borrowers apply for credit on online lending platforms, "insufficient comprehensive score" is a common assessment result, indicating the platform deems the borrower unqualified for credit.
After being explicitly rejected, can these individual sellers on Taobao really make platforms "make an exception" for subpar borrowers?
Investigation reveals that, based on different strategic methods, such sellers on Taobao can be divided into two major "factions," both being variants or extensions of existing black market operations.
02 Rights Protection Agents Extend to Pre-Loan Stage The first major category is essentially a variant of "rights protection agents."
Sellers of this faction typically maintain an air of mystery before buyers place orders. When asked about specific operational methods, they emphasize their professional skills but remain vague about details. Regarding success rates, sellers state that no technique can guarantee 100% success. If unsuccessful, half the fee is refunded, citing "basic labor and technical costs," and they specifically remind buyers that placing an order implies acceptance of this agreement.
Only after payment do sellers fully disclose their methods. The so-called professional technique turns out to be complaints. One seller admitted, "Platforms use fully automated machine reviews, so your own appeals have very low success rates. We apply pressure through third-party complaints, connecting to human customer service, with higher approval chances than appeals."
The subsequent operation is straightforward. Sellers do not inquire about the buyer's qualifications, such as existing loans or defaults. Buyers only need to provide their account on the respective lending platform. Within about 3-5 minutes, sellers send a screenshot of a successful complaint, including a complaint code. Buyers can check the complaint progress themselves within 1-3 working days using this code.
Illegal rights protection agents inciting borrowers to complain or even helping forge complaint materials is quite common. However, complaints usually revolve around refunding interest/fees or stopping debt collection, based on alleged infringement of rights by the platform. In the credit application stage, where platforms refuse to grant credit, it hardly seems like an infringement. How do rights protection agents extend to this stage, and what grounds and content do they fabricate for complaints?
Since sellers are unaware of buyers' specific situations, complaints use a unified template. From some cases provided by sellers, these "complaints" resemble appeals, focusing on explaining circumstances rather than accusing the platform of violations. For example, complaints emphasize the borrower's good personal credit history but sudden classification as having an insufficient comprehensive score, suspecting temporary system assessment deviations, and requesting a comprehensive review by the platform.
Besides gentle appeal-like complaints, there are also aggressive ones. For instance, on the Black Cat Complaint platform, some complainants escalate similar issues to "false advertising" or "infringement of consumer right to know," claiming that accounts show available credit but repeated withdrawal applications are rejected with only an "insufficient comprehensive score" notice, alleging false advertising and infringement of consumer rights, demanding specific reasons for rejection and restoration of reasonable credit limits.
Industry insiders note recently encountering such complaints, clearly unreasonable. "Any platform or financial institution has the right to independent risk control and cannot disclose risk control model details, as that would encourage fraud and loan abuse."
However, they admit complaints might sometimes have some effect. When platforms receive forwarded complaints, they usually conduct manual reviews. During this, they might discover previous automated reviews indeed had deviations and, aiming to settle matters, might restore some credit if the borrower's qualifications are acceptable. "But if the borrower's qualifications are truly poor, no amount of complaining will restore credit."
03 Loan Intermediaries' Qualification Packaging Another major category of sellers are variants of "loan intermediaries."
Their operational process differs from complaint-focused sellers. They typically inquire in detail about the buyer's basic situation and provide "customized" plans to improve comprehensive scores.
For example, upon learning a buyer previously registered with many online lending platforms, a seller might infer the insufficient score is mainly due to big data issues, then suggest clearing related account information, providing quick operational methods for the buyer to perform themselves.
According to one seller, clearing numerous accounts with one click involves downloading the respective telecom operator's app, finding the "secondary number renewal" service to display all online lending platform accounts under the phone number, and then unsubscribing with one click. After this, wait a few days for a significant improvement in comprehensive score.
Additionally, some sellers seize the opportunity to sell "big data reports," urging buyers to purchase reports for detailed insights into their online records across platforms, such as phone number and ID information abnormalities, platforms authorized with personal information, risk markings, etc., to provide more targeted solutions.
However, from many buyer feedbacks, the effectiveness of such solutions is "nebulous." Some users might accidentally hit key risk control points, but most methods are ineffective.
In fact, on social platforms like Xiaohongshu, content about "insufficient comprehensive scores" is abundant, mostly from loan intermediaries. Their content covers various aspects of improving borrower qualifications, including reducing application frequency, repaying small loans to nurture credit history, avoiding frequent changes in phone numbers or delivery addresses to enhance stability, etc. Some methods take months to show effects. The methods provided by Taobao sellers are merely the easiest-to-operate small part of many methods, with nothing particularly special.
The charging model of such "loan intermediary" sellers is similar to "rights protection intermediary" sellers, also not guaranteeing 100% success, with half refunds if unsuccessful.
04 Conclusion Overall, regardless of the method, so-called "rescuing insufficient comprehensive scores" operates on the edge of illegality as black or gray market activities. The sellers' real "skill" essentially sells information asymmetry and gambles on probability.
With increasingly refined regulation of loan assistance services, core risk control is inevitably returning to financial institutions. Any gray-area operations by black or gray markets can hardly influence independent risk control by financial institutions.
Moreover, the complaint tactics commonly used by various black or gray markets face complete ineffectiveness. In March this year, the National Financial Regulatory Administration released the "Measures for Handling Financial Consumer Complaints by Banking and Insurance Institutions (Revised Draft for Comments)." Compared to the 2020 measures, the revised draft adds content on "maintaining complaint order," emphasizing that financial consumers should act in good faith, objectively and rationally reflect demands through proper channels, and protect their lawful rights according to law. Regarding illegal rights protection agents, it further clarifies, "Banking and insurance institutions and relevant industry associations should actively take measures to cooperate in cracking down on illegal activities disrupting consumer complaint order, such as illegal proxy rights protection."
In terms of assessment system design, the revised draft explicitly states, "When conducting performance evaluations, banking and insurance institutions should comprehensively use positive incentives and negative constraints, reasonably allocate proportions and weights of relevant indicators, and must not simply use the number of consumer complaints as an assessment indicator."
This means the "lethality" of black market complaints will rapidly diminish. Previous attempts to coerce financial institutions through "flooding" complaints are no longer viable.
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