On July 9, the Domestic Market Management and Development Department (Ministry of Industry and Trade) said that on the morning of July 8, 2025, Market Management Team No. 1, Market Management Department of Quang Ninh province inspected a warehouse located in the premises of Dong Tam Trading Joint Stock Company, Mong Cai 3 ward, Quang Ninh province.
This is the location that Mr. Do Van Quang (residing in Mong Cai 2 ward) rented before passing away on June 26, 2025. According to verification from the death certificate issued by the People's Committee of Van Ninh commune, Mr. Quang died nearly two weeks before the inspection time.
At the time of inspection, the Inspection Team discovered a warehouse containing a total of 47,127 violating products, including: 16,166 smuggled cosmetic products with a total value of about 1.1 billion VND; 15,511 smuggled goods worth about 80 million VND; and 15,450 products of unknown origin, worth about 65 million VND. The total value of the violating shipment is estimated at VND 1.245 billion.
Notably, according to Mr. Pham Van Cong (Mr. Quang's brother-in-law), this warehouse was rented by Mr. Quang to a Chinese person named A Pin for use as a storage facility for goods. The warehouse rental contract was signed on June 1, 2025, just a few weeks before Mr. Quang passed away. Mr. Cong affirmed that the goods in the warehouse are not owned by Mr. Quang or him.
Through inspection of the warehouse management system, the Inspection Team determined that this was a transit point for a series of orders placed through many different TikTok accounts, with goods imported from the e-commerce site 1688.com (China). The warehouse management software is programmed in Chinese, developed and managed by the Chinese, not integrated with the domestic management system.
The warehouse staff only have the task of printing available orders to deliver to the delivery unit. The software system recorded the transaction from February 15, 2025 with a total amount of about 12 million yuan.
However, because the data is entirely in foreign languages and there is no mechanism to link to the domestic e-commerce system, it is not possible to trace the identities of related TikTok accounts, as well as the total amount of goods sold or the profits earned.
This is a typical case showing increasingly sophisticated smuggling tricks, hiding the clouds of social networking platforms and cross-border software systems to avoid tracing. The method of operating an "anonymous" warehouse, connecting multiple accounts and remote control is posing a big challenge for the authorities in checking and supervising e-commerce activities.
Currently, Market Management Team No. 1 has temporarily detained all the goods to continue investigating and clarifying the violator. The case also raises urgent requirements for controlling warehouse management technology, improving digital platform monitoring capacity and inter-sectoral coordination between market management, cyber security and customs in the context of increasingly complex cross-border e-commerce.
