Ming Moon Wolverhampton Chinese Restaurant (Photo : Trip Advisor)
The online business has spawned a lot of scams in different countries. A lot of the get-rich-schemes involve stocks, gold, investments and foreign exchange transactions.
However, in China, even the food business is being used by Internet scammers in two ways, according to a China Central TV (CCTV) expose, reported by Shanghai Daily. First, companies that advertise on online delivery service ele.me are often unlicensed and operate under unsanitary conditions.
However, their websites show spotless kitchens where the food is prepared. Second, a lot of hungry Chinese base on which online food maker to order on online ratings, some of which are fake.
Among the stomach-churning practices in these food businesses exposed by CCTV is a half-eaten sausage thrown into fried rice at the Shishuda restaurant in Beijing and a kitchen worker of Hongwei Restaurant cleaning a pot with dirty rags and using a dirty colander.
Ele.me means “Are you hungry?” in the Chinese language, but people would surely lose their appetite if they discovered that five restaurants with the same address in Tongzhou have just two staff preparing the food in a 10-square-meter room and serving about 400 orders a day.
Following the CCTV expose, ele.me said it would delist all food businesses from its website that have sanitary issues and lack licenses. The Shanghai Food and Drug Administration also ordered the website, based in the city, to report to it how it would correct the way it runs its business. The agency said it would punish establishments that breach rules when confirmed by investigations.
The faking of the online orders were done at Alibaba’s Taobao platform where online order makers charged the companies 5 to 10 yuan for placing fake orders online.
It seems that even overseas, some Chinese restaurants are also violating sanitation rules. In January, the Top China Restaurant in Tampa was closed for three days after state inspectors found more than 65 live cockroaches crawling in the kitchen and other sanitary issues, reported ABC.
