1. The crime is more concealed
Different from the on-site transactions of traditional smuggling, the suspects of e-commerce smuggling use the Internet platform to conduct false transactions, complete the transaction settlement through the third-party payment platform, and use logistics and express delivery companies for transportation and delivery, which makes the crime more concealed.
2. The smuggling network is larger
The integration of Internet technology and modern logistics has changed the time and space limitations of traditional smuggling. The Internet enables the wide-ranging dissemination of information and the hierarchical transmission to be realized instantly. The development of e-commerce smuggling shows a trend of “fission reproduction”. Using the Internet platform, smugglers are no longer limited to a small circle composed of personal connections, but have rapidly expanded into a semi-public smuggling network. In a case of e-commerce smuggling of health products, smugglers used domestic e-commerce platforms to retail cross-border goods. The smuggling gang composed of a few people quickly expanded to a huge smuggling network of hundreds of people, covering 29 provinces, cities and districts such as Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangsu. The speed of its spread and the wide range of its scope are difficult to match with traditional smuggling.
3. Greater social harm
Compared with general crimes, e-commerce smuggling is more harmful to society because it infringes on many objects (legal interests), spreads quickly, and covers a wide range. First, the wide coverage of the network has infinitely magnified the area of smuggling activities, resulting in a wide range of smuggled goods. Secondly, the rapid spread of online news and the wide audience have made commodity transactions more convenient, especially the smuggling of prohibited and restricted goods outside the positive list will have a great impact on national security. Finally, the convenience of e-commerce platforms has led to a sharp increase in the number of smuggled goods, causing great losses to national tax revenue, especially for ordinary goods smuggled through e-commerce platforms. By applying lower e-commerce preferential tax rates, a large amount of national tax revenue has been lost, which directly affects the healthy development of emerging formats and shakes the effective implementation of the national “Internet +” strategy.
4. More fragmented participants
Due to the characteristics of cross-border e-commerce with dispersed commodity types, small individual items, and large total volume, criminals can import goods in a dispersed manner, thereby concealing their true nature of trade, evading supervision, and evading taxes. The amount of smuggling, the amount of money involved, and the tax evasion involved in this kind of “drops of water make a deep abyss” model are also quite astonishing. In addition, the participants and service providers of cross-border e-commerce smuggling are diversified. The participants include cross-border e-commerce and domestic agents of cross-border e-commerce. The service providers include e-commerce platform companies, third-party payment platforms, logistics and warehousing companies, and customs declaration companies. Due to the existence of multiple entities and the mutual cooperation and information retention between the entities, the difficulty of supervision and crackdown has increased.