CCTV Exposes Fake Home Appliance Reviews: How Livestreams Rig Tests and Manipulate Buyers
Home appliance livestreams have become one of the most popular ways to shop in China — viewers watch real-time cleaning tests, side-by-side comparisons, and product demonstrations before pulling out their wallets. But a growing number of consumers have noticed something strange: the vacuum that performed flawlessly on screen struggles with basic dust at home. The mop that mopped up soy sauce in seconds seems ordinary in real life. The discrepancy isn’t bad luck — it’s a carefully orchestrated fraud.
IT-NEWS, July 12 — CCTV’s financial channel sent reporters undercover into multiple livestream agencies and uncovered the full playbook. At a company called Hunan Senmang Trading Co., which operates a livestream account called “Old Liu’s Floor Washer,” the most common trick was the quietest. When testing a competitor’s floor cleaning machine, a staff member would secretly shut the device off mid-demo. The machine would stop working, stains would remain on the floor, and the audience would see a failed product that couldn’t even handle basic cleaning. The implication was obvious: buy ours instead.
The staging went deeper. In one documented case, during a head-to-head comparison between two floor cleaners, a staff member working outside camera view poured plain water on one test track and dark soy sauce on the other. The difference in cleaning difficulty — not the machines themselves — created the dramatic split in results the livestream needed. Every comparison was scripted. The winners were chosen before the show started.
Another livestream account, “Xiao Lu’s Mite Remover,” used a different approach. While the host exaggerated the performance of their promoted vacuum, an assistant would quietly interfere with the competing devices — slipping a plastic bag over the competitor’s air intake to artificially reduce suction power. The account’s owner admitted to the undercover reporters that rigging results this way massively influenced viewer decisions. Their sales numbers proved it worked.
A third account, “Teacher Lin’s Learning Machine Review,” refined the deception into a two-layer system. On the surface, the host presented themselves as neutral and objective — the earnest reviewer just trying to help parents choose the right device for their kids. The dirty work happened in the comments. The agency kept three phones running simultaneously, each logged into a different account posing as a satisfied buyer. They’d post about how great the product was, how it changed their child’s grades, how Teacher Lin had never steered them wrong.
CCTV reporters also found internal documents on the agencies’ master control computers — scripts and playbooks written specifically for crisis management during livestreams. If the room went quiet, if the test visibly failed, if skeptical comments started rolling in, the document contained pre-written responses, engagement tactics, and comment-planting strategies to steer the narrative back on track.
The scale of the deception is worth pausing on. These aren’t rogue scammers operating from basements — these are registered companies running professional livestream studios, hiring hosts, maintaining inventory, and operating distribution pipelines. The entire apparatus is built on the assumption that viewers can be manipulated at every stage of the decision process: the visuals they see, the data they trust, and the peer reviews they read.
The report is the latest in a series of CCTV investigations into consumer tech fraud. Earlier pieces have covered illegal signal jammers being sold with electromagnetic radiation exceeding legal limits by double, modified electronic scales with hidden chips that let vendors change the weight of any product remotely, and digital product reviews where reviewers used special firmware, cloud-based cheats, and custom sample units to fabricate results. The pattern is clear — where there’s a buying decision, there’s someone building a system to fake the evidence that’s supposed to guide it.