Influencer fraud refers to deceitful activities carried out by social media influencers / KOL
A very popular and flashy influencer is finally being called out as a scammer after many rounds of unfulfilled promises to fans/followers/investors. Based on his story he started out humble beginnings as a chef to credit card sales to influencer/KOL(key opinion leader).
He is often seen driving different Ferraris in his video streams which effectively seem to portrays him as a successful young entrepreneur. He even has been interviewed by different Chinese media which helped to solidify his presence in the influencer sphere/space.
Umance Chong (aka Prawn King aka 锺宏绅 aka Eugene Chong Haou Inn) was one of the pioneers of selling seafood on Facebook Live via his Ricksmany seafood company. He purportedly once offered a car (Proton X50) as a prize to his fans who bought his seafood during 11/11 sales day. Some of his fans mentioned that the car prize was a fake publicity stunt and was given to his members posing as his fans. At hindsight, it didn't make sense to give a RM90k car based on a single day sales profit. There were some people who complained about the freshness of his seafood products and product weight to be not accurate (included the weight of the ice).
Umance Chong’s 2nd case was regarding him offering a RM399 3D2N snorkeling tour packages for Laguna Island Resort Redang but was instead denied by the Resort itself. He explained to his fans that he booked the tour packages via a tour agency as such Laguna Island Resort was not aware of this arrangement. Strangely enough, Umance change the location when he could not fulfil the order to another hotel in Langkawi instead of refunding the purchasers.
Umance Chong’s 3rd case was when he raised money from his fans to setup a franchise wholesale mart (SuperM Wholesale Mart) selling seafood and hotpot/steamboat ingredients. The venture collapsed after a few months in operation and food suppliers accused Umance of not paying them on supplied delivered. Investors complained that they were billed duplicated invoices. Investors lost at least RM400k for each wholesale mart invested. At its peak, there were a total of 9 SuperM wholesale marts around klang valley and it was expected to have 100 units for the near future.
The guy below who was one of the SuperM investor/victims invited by Amber Chia to come out in a press conference to reveal more information on the franchise.
The Crystal Leisure side of the story is that Umance Chong's team informed that they wanted to handle the tour themselves and ask that the deposit money to be transferred to his company accounts. Crystal Leisure initially engaged Umance Chong to sell their travel package because of their limited social media/online presence. The Umance Chong's side of the story is what he got from is the sales commission agreed in prior arrangements.
With so many cases already, it seems people keep getting scammed by him despite his bad reputation. The power of the internet and social media keeps bringing in new "waterfish" victims. Umance seems to be jumping from business to business from hotpot business, frozen seafood, travel and franchise wholesale mart, it does look like a lack of business focus.
He also got into the news early this year in April for bad road behavior, coming out of his sports car to beat some poor fella driving a Proton X50 who accidentally bumped into his sports car.
To be frank, I quite admired him initially during the days of his FB Live selling, his viewership during his live broadcasts were always in the thousands which was unheard off at that time. However, when people started warning about him as a scammer and the events that happened after has changed my mind and impression about Umance Chong. He is quite charismatic and talks very well, he could have gone very far with his talent but sadly he chose to go on the wrong path.
The moral of the story to remember the saying "All that glitters is not gold". All things look good from the outside only. People need to do their due diligence when conducting business with influencers. A lot of these influencers misuse their celebrity status to scam their fans and followers. One internet marketing expert once told me live streaming broadcast sellers usually do the volume game or the losses game, the goal of doing these streams is just to create product and service publicity, they mostly take losses or even if they make a profit they have to sell a lot. That is the reason why influencers will prefer to be agent to product and services and collect sales commission fees. The other thing is bringing in celebrities to promote products does not mean the product has passed due diligence, I recall many years ago the collapsed Geneva gold once brought in Datin Rosmah Mansor to officiate their event, it made the company look legit with big names gracing their event. News media outlets are also another culprit for perpetuating fraud as they also feed on the influencer's way to fame by not doing any investigative and background checks before bringing in questionable influencers on their platform.
In the US most of the influencer scams are influencers scamming fans/followers to buy some new cryptocurrency token or NFT (Non-Fungible Token).
Note : This article is for education and public awareness purposes. Most of the information here are from China Press which reported a lot of updates on this case.
