Unfortunately, doing business with China attracts many unscrupulous people. It can be:
- Moneychangers who accept real money from clients but give out counterfeit cash dollars in China
- Agents who create catalogs from stolen photos and accept orders for non-existent goods
- People who deliberately impersonate well-known buyers
Be careful: we have already encountered several clones of our channels and employees; scammers create similar accounts and write to clients supposedly on our behalf.
The precautions are as follows:
📌 If they write to you on behalf of some company, you can always go to its website and look at real contacts and then, either write there yourself, or ask the person to contact you from this particular number/email. Look for reviews of that company or a specific agent.
📌 There is no need to fall for big names “We work with Elon Musk, and in general we have access to the Apple factory!” Firstly, when working with China, commercial information is not an empty phrase. Such things are strictly regulated, and those who work with someone big know how to remain silent about it. Secondly, there is almost no way to prove such cooperation, which means you can talk about whatever you want. We can print Zara tags and bags in any printing house, but does this mean that we work with their factory? Nope!
📌 Real photographs of products taken in the same style inspire more confidence. If your agent only has “Chinese” photos (of the model, with hieroglyphs, some of the photos are blurred) and no photos of her own, then this is a reason to think. Such a person may not be in China at all, and after the money is transferred he will simply disappear.
📌 Do not leave comments like “send the catalog to my mail 12345 mail ru” in public space. Fraudsters will immediately target you. We always and everywhere have all the contacts listed - don’t be lazy and contact first.
What NOT to do:
🪓 Demanding to send a passport is useless. To begin with, you can freely buy scans of any passports on the Internet, even along with a selfie. And then, let's scroll the situation forward: let's say you were scammed out of money, and you go to the police somewhere in the EU, show the scammer's passport, and say that this person in China deceived you. The police nod understandingly, board the plane with you, and fly to China to punish the unscrupulous agent and return your money. It seems that it will be different.
🪓 It’s also useless to ask “Send the contacts of your clients, I’ll ask them how you work.” Firstly, how will you understand that it was the contacts of clients that were given to you, and not a friend, for example? Secondly, people with a normal level of business culture have such a concept as commercial information. So far, not a single client of ours has yet asked to give his contact information to everyone.
What can you do to protect yourself:
💡 Carefully study the social networks of the company or agent in China. Look at how many years the account has been maintained, how informative and consistent the posts are, and what about the content (they shoot it themselves or simply post ready-made photos from suppliers, of which there are thousands in the public domain).
💡 Ask questions about work, at different times and from different accounts. Based on the answers, you can understand whether a person works with this product.
💡 You can ask to shoot a video from the warehouse so that today’s date can be seen on it, or that your name be called (if the video shows boxes, bales of clothes with names or codes written on them, this is a good sign).
💡 Place a small trial order; if in doubt, do not start cooperation with large amounts. Or come to China in person!
Safe transactions everyone!