Nearly 20% Chinese mobile phone users surveyed used car calling mobile business app, and we can see that mobile car calling market has been developing gradually. China mobile car calling market began to detonate from the second half of 2014, and developed quickly driven by the capital. Under the background of car-purchasing restriction policy of some second and third-tier cities, China mobile car calling market prospect remains good.

45.2% of Chinese mobile phone users used mobile car calling service after receiving promotion offers; and this proportion is far higher than other factors. Now the mobile car calling market is in the early development. Using marketing activities to gain a large number of new users has become a main tactic among car calling app companies.

In 2014, the budget of 76.9% of Chinese taxi calling app users is under 50 yuan per trip while the budget of 37.7% of car calling applications users is between 50 to 100 yuan. .

Users’ application usage scenarios distribution is relatively balanced. Taxi applications are a kind of high-frequency and broad-coverage applications, with a strong adhesive feature; once able to live with local travel information and users’ data, it will become the main way of O2O marketing in the future.

Although 37.1% users who used the mobile car application understood that the government took appropriate regulatory governance policies for mobile car market, the usage frequency has not changed much; 34.4% usage frequency decreased slightly. But overall, the appropriate government regulation of car calling mobile apps had little impact on the users’ intention to keep using this type of apps.

At the end of 2014, taxi calling apps were the used most frequently, accounting for 43.2%; and 30.5% used them often. The usage of business car calling apps increased slightly, accounting for 15.6%.

In 2015,  taxi calling, private car calling,  carpooling, car sharing and other sharing models will accumulate a large number of passengers’ locations, transport routes, usage time and other data on those mobile platforms. These data could go through deep integration with local life services after collated and excavated, and could form a marketing system with passenger routes.

After taxi and car, carpooling will be the next main battlefield of car calling applications. Although some of the participants entered the market, the market potential has not been fully tapped. After the merge of Kuaidi and Didi, they can expand their business lines and integrate existing resources. The carpooling market trends to bring into another wave of marketing craze in the next period.

Originally a clerk working for a small firm, Chauffeur Mr. Li found that Uber would earn him an income more than his salary on a monthly basis. Uber as a platform have gathered many chauffeurs like Mr. Li. The high subsidy and low rate helps Uber gain a great success in spite of his much backwardness compared to Didi in the Chinese market.

While a large swarm of car owners are scrambling for Uber, Uber also faces up with lots of click farmers. The media tried to search Tabao.com for the two key words: “Uber” and “优步（Uber in Chinese), finding that the results were all about account trading and fraud transactions. There were more than 200 Taobao links about trading of passenger and chauffeur accounts. Among these links, the firstly appearing ones had a trading volume of RMB 14,000 or so. Most Taobao shops provide a Uber QQ chat platform group.

A reporter from the media bought an inactivated Uber passenger account from the Taobao shops “Uber Home of Car Owners” and “Fish Little Store”, respectively. The shops provided a complete package of information including Uber and Alipay accounts, and mobile verification code, with one click farmer’s textbook as a compliment.

An inactivated Uber account is considered as essential to fraud transactions. Because it contains no record of car use, one can get a new passenger voucher worth RMB 30. In fraud transactions, if the fare is around RMB 30, you can get Uber’s subsidy at almost zero cost. Take Beijing for example, where the subsidy during rush hours will be 2.5 folds of the normal one. In that case, you can earn RMB 100 per order.

“Quite a number of users buy 100 or even 500 Uber accounts in one lot. Some users also ask if they can buy account automatic generators. But this can easily cause ‘poisonous needles’. There are also some cheaper accounts for sale in Taobao.com, but note that some are deactivated accounts that are possibly being frozen”, a customer service clerk from “Uber Home of Car Owners” tells the journalists. The clerk repeatedly tells the journalists that one cannot use the same account to farm click on the same chauffeur’s service twice, and the optimal number of farm clicks is expected to be less than 10.

Even if each account gives 5 farm clicks, “Uber Home of Car Owners” has produced 50,000 farm clicks alone. In Taobao platform, there are at least 15 shops with equivalent trade volumes. Conservatively speaking, there are more than 200,000 Uber accounts sold by Taobao shops for fraud transactions purposes. Some shops even announce that big volume buyers can befriend their QQ or WeChat accounts. It means that some large orders avert Taobao system’s governance and reach a deal by other means.

Diversified means of fraud transactions

QQ Group (group chat account) is a converging place of click farm information. There are scores of QQ Groups directly named after “Uber” or “Didi click farm”, yet differentiated by the prefix – name of a city. Such exclusive QQ Groups are accessible in Beijing, Hangzhou, Wuhan and Nanjing and other cities. Each of the QQ Groups named after “China” or “National” gather nearly 2,000 click farmers.

The perpetual topics dominating these QQ Groups include “Ask for needling (means fraud transactions)”, “Ask for nurse (means click farmer)”, “numerous mobile numbers for sale”, “sell inactivated passenger account, inactivated and much-used chauffeur accounts” and “click farm textbook, no risks” and other click farm tips. There are also discussions on the teaching of skills and the best fraud transactions.

Although click farms are collectively known “needling”, there are as many methods and tricks as beyond your imagination.

The simplest method is to ask your colleagues or friends to help fraud transactions, which is but an occasional behaviour. If you want to pursue long-term click farm, you need to find a click farm professional. A medium-sized team of click farmers may have more than 30,000 inactivated Uber passenger accounts.

A tailored service chauffeur Mr. Wang tells the media that the professionals will help to click farm in different ways. Some are a team who will send four persons to actually sit in each car, each having many accounts; they have “ups and downs” in sequence over the short distances, and with one day’s work, they can creates the expected number of fraud clicks. Others are teams who have virtual operation devices. They can click farm without taking a car. All they need to know is your car registration number and location. They will locate you and then have a virtual drive to form a like order.

Apart from fraud transactions by professions and non-professionals, self-fraud transactions makes up almost more than half of the trade. Usually, a click farmer will buy a mobile phone with modifiable IEME code or own many ones to log onto many passenger and chauffeur accounts, in order to enable “self-needling”. By this means, some click farmer can earn nearly RMB 20,000 every week.

A bigger surprise is that even if you have no car, you can get Uber’s subsidy by fraud transactions. One solution is to buy chauffeur account and information from QQ Group and Taobao shops. Alternatively, you can ask somebody to apply an account for you, who uses fake driver’s license (retouching by Photoshop) for registration.

Another solution is that some professional will provide one complete package of services. All they need are chauffeur account and password; the remaining jobs are automatically done by the computer, such as virtual positioning, auto-drive for order receipt, and passenger-side auto-ordering.

The bittersweet chauffeur

Chauffeurs hold different attitudes toward fraud transactions. Many a chauffeur says that they have ever click farmed, but for different reasons.

As mentioned above, Mr. Lin is a frequent click farmer, who tells the media that fraud transactions can earn you fast money and get things done quickly. On the other hand, he just thinks that his car would have only a service mileage of 100,000 kilometres in two years if the adequate mileage is covered. This is a fast depreciation that is not cost-effective.

Mr. Lin tells the media that there were once many click farmers, and most chauffeurs would do it, Uber couldn’t but let them go unchecked. Now Uber’s rules have changed, and it not worth fraud transactions any longer, especially asking someone to “needle”. That’s why he does it himself now.

Mr. Li and Mr. Wang are chauffeurs who click farm on Uber occasionally, on the similar ground of the increasing quota of tasks for Uber’s subsidy. 85 orders a week means that an Uber chauffeurs has to work six days a week, except the day of non-operation due to vehicle restriction rule, and picks up 15 passengers a days by working 12 hours a day. That’s why they need less burden.

However, some chauffeurs object to the practices of fraud transactions, thinking that their actual painstaking work ends up earning less than those click farmers do. But if an Uber account is frozen due to click farm, it would be better to take the pains of normal work.

They believe that lower-paid as it is, the new subsidy rule can urge them to earn up to RMB 5,000 a week by working harder, a way that is fairer to those who really do.

All Uber chauffeurs, fraud transactions or not, are dissatisfied with the sudden increase in the fraud orders received by mistakes after the enforcement of the new rule of order dispatch. According to the new subsidy rule, if you want a double subsidy, you need both receive the expected number of orders and to execute 60% of them. The cancellation of orders has, however, greatly decreased their number of orders executed.

A war between fraud and anti-fraud

Perhaps, Uber shows both likes and dislikes when being click farmed on. On one hand, fraud transactions means data prosperity in some sense, adding a promoter to their financing campaign. On the other hand, the defrauding of real money from Uber platform lowers the understanding of users’ demand. As for the rampant fraud transactions, Uber is also continuously working out his own anti-fraud rules.

This week, Uber updates his subsidy rules by changing the last week’s minimum subsidy of RMB6,000 for each 85 orders received into the current subsidy being doubled minimum fare. The order dispatch rule also changes from the nearby dispatching to the small-scale random dispatching.

The new rules bring greater “needling” difficulty. The orders of a click farmer can be easily dispatched to non-click farm chauffeurs, and many cancellations may lead to the account freezing by Uber system. The introduction of the new subsidy rule disables the quantity-based fraud transactions, because the specified quantity of orders, if not worth much in total, don’t mean higher subsidy.

In addition, the new version of Uber app has toughened the efforts to free fraud accounts. The great number of short-distance orders, virtual operation, two passenger-orders for the same chauffeur and use of one mobile phone for different accounts will easily cause account freezing. Uber usually works by freezing IEME code of a mobile phone. Once IEME code is frozen, any account cannot run in the mobile phone and then get frozen as well.

Uber’s new rules decrease the practices of fraud transactions. On one hand, the difficulty and intensity of earning subsidy is not so much as before. On the other hand, the account freezing is far stricter than ever. But in the field of click farm, there are a ceaseless flow of new comers for the sake of benefits, and veterans and professionals can always find new loopholes and methods against the rules.

For minimum fare, those who commit fraud transactions provide an optimal amount, depending on the fraud transactions of different periods, in order to ensure the maximum earning within the upper limit of subsidy. In response to the new rule of order dispatch, they suggest that chauffeurs click farm in desolate places. The greater intensity of account freezing urges them to quicken the updating of passenger accounts and to sell mobile phones and software with modifiable IEME codes.

Experts tell the media that Uber is fully equipped with anti-fraud technology. But Uber’s data is not big or smart enough. If too strict control is introduced, the unexpected harms will occur, affecting the user experience. What can be done now is find a balance.

Besides, firms find it very difficult to give more punishments to click farmers. The severest form is but account freezing and earning take-back, far from being a real threat.

When interviewed, Zhao Zhanling, a cyber-lawyer, says that click farm is a default of service contract and platforms like Uber can punish click farmers as per the contract. But this doesn’t easily constitute a breach of law. Still, the breach of law is a civil action that cannot be addressed at administrative and criminal levels. It is not a cost-effective choice. So firms seldom turn to law for resort.

The focus of the cat-and-mouse game between fraud transactions and anti-fraud transactions is on subsidy and earning. The competition between firms and the market growing drive determines the prolonged use of subsidy. This guerrilla war-like game will continue as well.

Movie apps ranked third by use frequency. Such apps provide special price of movie tickets during special periods to attract consumers in China.

Only 7.6% respondents use special vehicle apps. They can provide 20 yuan or 50 yuan in a single trade while the number of such app users is not so big.

专车应用虽然单笔补贴力度都比较大，比如单笔补贴20元、甚至单笔50元的优惠券等活动都比较普遍，可用户使用的次数却比较低，仅7.6%的用户表示经常使用专车应用补贴。家政类服务的补贴使用次数最低，为4.3%。

40.8% respondents know apps with subsidies from friends’ shared news. Major apps are promoted with subsidies online in 2015.

Over 80% respondents use apps for getting subsidies in 2015.

31.2% respondents feel satisfied with apps. Only 16.4% feel not so content with such apps as they use them only to get the subsidies only.

Nearly 50% respondents will keep the apps after subsidies offer ended.