(Abacus is a unit of the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba, the operator of Taobao and Xianyu.)

Alibaba, China's ecommerce giant

The services use software to animate still images of faces, with the resulting video being used to pass apps’ facial recognition, which usually require users to blink or move their heads, proving they’re not just a still image.

People looking to use these services have to provide the vendors with the profile pictures they want to use and the account login details. The vendors will then verify the users’ Tantan account, according to The Beijing News. One of the organization’s reporters successfully became a verified user with pictures of Chinese actor Wen Zhang.

When I reached out to one of these vendors on Taobao, I was asked to talk to them on WeChat. The Beijing News reported this is a common way of trying to avoid scrutiny on Taobao. The vendor then sent me a video showing what their software does… and the effect is surreal.

I asked the vendor whether the facial recognition works by playing the video in front of a smartphone, and the vendor said yes. But it didn’t work when I tried it for myself.

We reached out to Tantan with questions about its facial verification system, but we didn’t get a response.

Meet Baidu, China’s homegrown search engine

We reached out to Alibaba about these vendors on its ecommerce platforms, but the company did not respond. By the time of publication, though, the listings providing facial verification services for Tantan had disappeared.

But similar services are still available on Xianyu. The listings can even be found on Taobao, where searching “passing app’s facial verification” shows more than a dozen Xianyu listings. Some of them, like the vendors mentioned above, say they can verify accounts for you, while others sell tutorials. Many of them claim that their services work on multiple apps.