how luxuries cause murder in Paris in France

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A robbery involving luxury goods purchased in Paris led to a home invasion and murder, with Hermès bags becoming the harbinger of death.

On June 30, 2023, at noon, a truck left a warehouse in the Seine-et-Marne department of France, heading towards the northern city of Tomblaine. While driving on the 4th Ring Road, a black van with red and blue dual-color lights suddenly forced the truck to stop. Three people jumped out, shouting "Police! Customs!" One of them was wearing a bulletproof vest and brandishing a handgun. The driver was dragged out, blindfolded, handcuffed, and shoved into the van. Half an hour later, he was stripped down to his underwear and dumped in an abandoned parking lot.

The truck robbery resulted in a loss of €1.5 million, but the goods were highly unusual: 100 Hermès handbags (including 50 classic Birkin bags and one limited-edition black and gold rare leather bag), 372 LV handbags, 3 Rolex watches, 1 Patek Philippe watch, and dozens of designer clothing items and perfumes. It's obvious to anyone with a discerning eye that the value is disproportionate—50 Birkin bags alone are worth €1.5 million; were the other luxury items given away for free? There's clearly something fishy going on.

Even stranger, the delivery truck lacked any courier company markings, the driver didn't know the contents of the goods, yet the robbers were able to intercept it precisely in traffic. The insurance company refused to pay and dispatched a private investigator to investigate whether insurance fraud was involved.

When the news broke, Xiaohongshu (a Chinese social media platform) and the Parisian Chinese community were filled with lamentations—most of these luxury goods were sent to Chinese customers by personal shoppers. The bags are gone, the insurance company has launched an investigation, and those personal shoppers who had received full payment or deposits face the risk of bankruptcy.

The shipment was handled by "Penguin Logistics," a Chinese-owned company specializing in European customs clearance and tax avoidance services. The truck also contained packages from other small courier companies, essentially a second layer of subcontracting, creating a messy situation.

After a week of silence, Penguin Logistics announced that the insurance company had not yet paid out, but the company would make a humanitarian payment of 10% of the goods' value, requiring customers to provide purchase receipts and other evidence. Desperate personal shoppers voiced their outrage.

Among them, the most attention-grabbing was a user with the online name "Miss Paris Kong," who called herself an "ultimate Hermes connoisseur" and regularly posted photos of various Hermes bags. She claimed to have a shipment of goods in her truck, including the rare leather bag. She said she was close to the owner of the company and believed he wouldn't steal it from her. She then regularly updated the case's progress, acting like a champion of consumer rights.

The insurance company's detectives were far more efficient than the police, quickly identifying the black van disguised as a police car and finding clues in the Bobigny district northeast of Paris—the second-highest crime-ridden area in France for the sale of stolen goods. Police arrested four suspects, aged 24 to 36, all with multiple prior convictions. They confessed to robbing multiple trucks over the past year under orders from their superiors, with loot ranging from cigarettes and alcohol to electronics. This time, the interception was successful because someone had planted a GPS tracker in the shipment.

The person who provided the GPS tracking was a Chinese man named Zhang Yi. He was convicted of "aiding and abetting crime," merely a peripheral figure in the criminal network, but what truly drew attention was his other identity.

Zhang Yi entered France on a tourist visa 10 years ago but became an illegal immigrant. There, he met Kong Jingwen, also from China, and the two lived together and ran a personal shopping business. Kong Jingwen is the "Miss Kong," a prominent figure in the consumer rights advocacy movement, with 50,000 followers on Instagram, showcasing her travels, food, and luxury goods—a picture of wealth and beauty. She even revealed that the day before the robbery, she went to the warehouse to discuss business with the Tencent (Tencent's parent company) manager.

Who hid the GPS tracker in the goods? The answer is obvious. Colluding with the robbers to rob themselves not only allowed them to resell the bags but also to claim insurance compensation—a veritable goldmine.

Even more chilling is that, in an effort to secure a lighter sentence, one of the robbers became a witness, confessing to other crimes committed by the criminal group, including a cold case involving the murder of a Chinese student in May 2023.

On May 17th, a leaking ceiling occurred in a luxury apartment building in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. The landlord, using an emergency key, found 25-year-old Chinese student Lin lying face up on the sofa bed, his hands bound, his face wrapped in duct tape, already deceased. The autopsy revealed over ten bruises all over his body, ligature marks on his neck, and the cause of death was suffocation due to a large amount of fluid entering his trachea and lungs—his nose was shattered, causing blood to flow backward, and his mouth was sealed shut, preventing him from spitting out blood; he suffocated from his own blood.

Lin came from a wealthy family and was considered a second-generation rich kid, but he was introverted, rarely left his home, and relied on takeout for sustenance. The doors and windows were intact at the crime scene, but the apartment was in disarray; wardrobes and bookshelves were open, and clothes and miscellaneous items were scattered everywhere. Designer sneakers and an LV umbrella were found in the entryway, and a Hermes wallet containing €7,500 was found in the room, but the robbers left it untouched. Police speculate that this was not a spontaneous robbery, but a premeditated attack with a clear objective—to steal something more valuable from Lin.

A tip from a witness led police to two suspects: Hu Er, a UPS deliveryman, and Xiong Da, a recently released convict. Hu Er was responsible for delivering to Lin's apartment area, and Lin had given him the apartment's access code for convenience. One delivery, Hu Er noticed several Hermes bags piled on Lin's bed. Upon returning home, he contacted Xiong Da, who desperately needed money, and the two decided to strike.

They initially planned to steal from Lin when he went out, but Lin was a homebody and hadn't left the apartment for several days, so they opted for robbery. On the night of the incident, Xiong Da donned Hu Er's work clothes and entered the building using the access code. Lin, mistaking him for a deliveryman, opened the door and was subdued. Xiong Da ransacked the apartment, punching and kicking him until he was forced to reveal his bank card PIN, then knocked him unconscious before fleeing, unaware that Lin had died from blood inhalation.

Police found a large amount of cash and leather goods at Xiong Da's apartment, some of which belonged to Lin. The two were initially charged with burglary, kidnapping, and murder, later changed to manslaughter, and are currently awaiting trial.

The murder of Lin and the truck robbery were initially two unrelated cases, but the police unexpectedly solved the case due to a tainted witness. Netizens, however, linked this to Ms. Kong and Zhang Yi, because Lin occasionally worked as a luxury goods reseller, albeit as a secondary distributor. Before his death, he received a large online order: four bags, including an extremely expensive custom-made crocodile leather bag. He died four days after sending the message to order the bags.

After his death, Ms. Kong left him a message on WeChat: "My big boy, if there's an afterlife, let's be friends again," indicating that the two knew each other and had a good personal relationship. It's possible that only Ms. Kong in all of Paris could produce so many rare leather bags at once. When Zhang Yi was exposed for colluding with a criminal group to commit insurance fraud, netizens speculated that they might have wanted to hire someone to steal back the bags they had just sold to Lin and resell them, or even that the big customer might have been Ms. Kong's alternate account. They just didn't expect the thugs they hired to be so ruthless, resulting in Lin's death.

However, there is no evidence to suggest that Ms. Kong or Zhang Yi were the employers. Police concluded that Xiong Da and Hu Er committed robbery and murder out of greed. Under French law's principle of "presumption of innocence," Miss Kong was not held responsible for Lin's death, and in the truck robbery case, only Zhang Yi was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment with a 2-year suspended sentence; Miss Kong escaped unscathed.

The day before the verdict, she was still actively promoting products online, passionately arguing with a small-time reseller who demanded compensation. The only difference was that Zhang Yi, whom she called her "dear husband," had become "cold-hearted Old Zhang." She emphasized that they had never married and that if she wanted money, she should go to him in prison. This attitude of refusing to pay angered those who had been scammed, leading to numerous exposés on Xiaohongshu, Weibo, and Zhihu, thoroughly exposing the luxury goods reseller industry.

In the truck robbery, the truth behind the severely mismatched value of 100 Hermes bags and 50 Birkin bags was that a considerable number were counterfeit, and no proper invoices could be produced. Therefore, the assessed damages were naturally much lower than expected. The world of personal shoppers is rife with deception and sophisticated tactics: claims of "support for verification at official stores" are often unsubstantiated; invoices, videos, and engraving services are particularly rife with counterfeiting. Some even create 1:1 replicas of official stores in studios, hire extras to film videos, and then send the counterfeit goods to France to "breathe in Paris" before shipping them back to China, all to make the origin of the goods appear authentic. This is the truth behind the discrepancy between the goods in the truck and their actual value—most are counterfeit goods exported and then resold domestically, with a fraction of their real value.

The profit margin for selling counterfeit bags can reach 800%, far exceeding that of drugs. From the perspective of this enormous profit-driven approach, incidents like the murder of Lin, a student in the personal shopping industry, are both unexpected and somewhat understandable.

As for why the Hermès Birkin bag is so coveted by wealthy women and socialites, it was originally designed in 1983 by the president of Hermès for actress Jane Birkin as a practical "mother bag." Jane used it for decades, until it faded, deformed, and covered in her children's doodles and stickers. She said, "Isn't a bag meant to be used? Otherwise, what would you want to use it for?" In the eyes of this true "great-grandmother," it was just an everyday object. When something that should be used begins to dominate humanity, and even kills people because of it, that's the real horror story of the next distorted consumerism.