How to avoid international business scams when it comes to money transfer or transactions?
business scams is serious matter when money gets invovled.
China, as it's opening up its doors to the world, has attracted millions of buyers to this great land of factory.
As the business goes, these business scams thrives too. And these have caused serious problems to both sellers and buyers.
The Government, I believe, has been working hard on solving the problems, but these scams are just gladiators, they are fighting to their last breath, or they are like Apple Phones or Samsung phones, they have new versions with fancy updated features coming up each couple of months and it never ends.
They are like aliens too, they can not be seen but they are among us.
We might not defeat scams but we might well avoid them.
Choosing a company
Assuming you're shopping online and you've never contacted these companies/sales before.
Firstly, ask the sales to proivde thorough information regarding to the company, see if they got any videos, wether it's about products or the company.
If possible ask for a video chat, so you will see you the people you're dealing with and even the product details and now you see the things in real. This is important, and if you're talking to a faked company, then you're screwed from the very beginning.
Assuming you're now in touch with a good company and everything so far has been pleasant and you're about to place an order. Now read following:
Fake sellers' ID
In most cases, Scammers hack the sellers' mail system, then they fake their email IDs with which are extremely close to the orginal ones, and contact the buyers in the sellers' names.
Now I will take: sales@jacuzzi-bathtub.com for instance.
jacuzzi-bathtub.com is a registered company domain name which is hard for the scammmers to work on, so they can not have it as sale@jacuzzi-bathub.com
But what they do can fake is sales@jacuzi-bathtub.com, or even sales@jacuzzi-bathubs.com as long as these domains are available.
It will be even easiler for scammers to fake an ID from yahoo or hotmail or gmail, it's will be just like changing a alphabet or a digit.
for instance, I am keeping Bruce1982@y7mail.com as my privite email.
But if it's hacked, someone could just get it as Brucc1982@ymail.com or Bruce.1982@y7mail.com
Contacting buyers
Scammer contact buyers with these fake email IDs, but the name displayed will be the same as that of the real one.
The buyer gets one bruce<bruce1982@y7mail.com>
He might get one fake from bruce<bruce1982@y7mail.com>
Fake buyers' ID
Now the buyers write back to the faked email IDs, the scammers will now fake another email ID which is close to that of the buyer.
And then he contacts the real seller with all the feedback/messages he just received from the real buyer.
If the seller didnt' notice anything wrong, something sad is just about to happen.
Operation
Scammers can be with you for months, he is like precise messenger who passes on every wrinks and whisper between you and your clients.
Now the seller sends out the payment request, the scammer intercepts it and with just a little modifications, he sends it to the buyer, then the money is at his account.
This is, I perfer to say, long time operation, it's like the buyers and sellers are deeply inflected and they have no idea what's going on until the seller dont' see the promised money for days.
Well, there are short-term operations
These have to be in Chinese holidays, like May Holidays, or National holidays when the sellers are apprarently out of reach for like 5-7 days, this is timing.
Scammers write from fake eamil ID advising change of account Number, chang of loading date, finishing ahead of time thus requesting balance payment or down payment...blah blah blah.
Scammers don't follow up for months but the have been watching you. And they take this one shot they make it.
Solutions:
We can fight these spams by ourselves, and I have a few pionts as following:
Firstly, always check the eamil address from the seller, is it the same from the very beginning?
This is especially true when you're receving invoices or any other documents from the seller..
Secondly, before any wire transfer, please confirm it by phone call, or even messages on whatsapp, just keep your contacts up to date.
Thirdly, When money sent, forward the bank receipt to the seller once availble, This is very important as the seller can check if the money's going to a wrong place or not.
If any dismatch found on that documents, they can contact the benificiary bank not to cash money to the "scammers", so the money is still secure.
If we follow up these "rules", you should be safe here, so is your money.
For more questions, please contact me Bruce at
sales@jacuzzi-bathtub.com
or whatsapp： + 8615257104449
