KrASIA Weekly: Grab, Pinduoduo take on online fraud, Mobike retreats from APAC

Hi there, it’s Robin.

This week we saw two tech behemoths fighting back against one stumbling block for online businesses – fraud. Scammers have demonstrated time and again their innate ability to game systems when there’s money to be made.

Grab is one of them, announcing the launch of a new anti-fraud technology suite in Indonesia this week. Grab and other ride-sharing platforms have struggled with instances of fake bookings and other fraud schemes with which some drivers try to skim off bonuses.

Chinese social commerce company Pinduoduo is fighting another type of crime: fake goods sold as the real deal on its platform. The company is now reportedly set to hire another 500 more staffers to tackle the problem of counterfeits.

Meanwhile, the bike-sharing industry is still in growing pains. After Ofo sacked its operations team in Singapore just before the Lunar New Year, more than 15 others from Mobike lost their jobs this week as the Chinese bike-sharing company pulls back to China. Some good news for a change from Hello Chuxing, previously HelloBike. The firm reports that its social credit scheme has helped significantly reduce the number of damaged bikes. Careless parking and vandalism are some of the problems the bike-sharing sector haven’t been fully solved.

For Mobike, its acquisition by the Hong Kong-listed Meituan-Dianping last year failed to turn the tides. Losses kept growing and ended up accounting for more than half of the US$1.27 billion of Meituan’s total losses in 2018.

Closer to home in Southeast Asia, things are picking up steam in Vietnam. The booming e-commerce market and rising middle class are luring e-commerce giants in. After Amazon, Alibaba has joined in the game with a strategy designed to help Vietnamese companies export their products globally.

Read on to find out more interesting stories from last week, and feel free to tip us if you have news clue or you just want to talk with us, email us at [email protected] and we are looking forward to hearing from you.

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