Advice for telling whether a Chinese supplier is a scammer

I recently received this from a Chinese supplier after posting on a Chinese web site my frustration with Chinese suppliers.

Hi,

I would like to share my research about how to distinguish the reliable supplier from a world of vendors.

China as the world factory for exporting since it's the reform and opening-up policy. Nearly all of us have benefited from its cheap and not so bad products. And we have been getting used to their products so badly. However, things
changed in a way that makes it so hard to do business with Chinese suppliers. Some of the vendors become short-sighted. They don't care about building long term relationships. What they only want is how much money they can make from this or that bargain. So today I'm gonna show you some tips that you may need when you
decide to purchase from Chinese vendors.

Suspicion One: No Fax Number or the FAX and TEL are the same!
It's pretty weird for a company that could not equip the basic communication tools.' As for a modern company, they should have!

Suspicion Two : No Company Mail
It's really to believe that a company trades only use Hotmail and TEL. No Company mail or Fax. Why? To save money? That's not the right way to do business.

[b] Suspicion Three: No Tel, No Fax, No Mobile, No Add, No Company Mail[/b]
As for trading companies, some of them do not leave their company mail or just simply for example Link hidden: Login to view or Link hidden: Login to view . So when you see this kind of Contact US. Be careful who you’re dealing with!

Suspicion Four: Different Companies, Same Tel. Various Companies share the same TEL (Weird? Or I should say Cheater!)

Suspicion Five:Only Hong Kong Company Address, But who claims themselves manufacturer.
Be aware that some of the companies they only have Hongkong Company address but claims they are manufacturer. These sly vendors operate offshore companies and all other contacts they provide are totally out of nowhere.

I cannot guarantee that above information is absolutely accurate. But they are still useful when you decide to place an order with Chinese Suppliers. Have some Google research or use their local search Baidu to do some background work. Losing money is not so much important comparing to getting reputation ruined by the unreliable
suppliers.

One more thing, you may notice that they are not a single company but a group of companies. So you need to be really carefully and thoroughly concerned about the choosing the right suppliers.

Actually this is sound advice. I hope it helps people from being ripped off.

That's actually very sound advice. Couple more basic points you can add to that are, check for payment options, stay well clear of money wires and check the companies domain name. Any company with a domain name that is under two years old, tread very carefully.

As far as the domain names, one of the most important factors rather than how old the site is, is when does the domain name expire. If it expires in 1 year, the company does not plan on being around longer than a year.
While checking domain names is not fool proof it is a help in making a decision.
Another thing to consider is if they go to trade shows, the chances of them being legitimate is much better if they go to trade shows.

Thank you for sharing jkent. Those are good points and something we need to watch out for when doing supplier checks. :) Thanks for your help.

Good research, I have been doing my own personal research also on chinese businesses for over 10 years. First, do not forget that 95%-98% of the USA's resources, goods services and trading comes from China. The USA certainly have connections to legitimate China wholesalers. Take for instance, W**M**T, believe it or not this multi million dollar store does get products from China, so China being a MAJOR resource for the USA should not be ridiculed because of a bad bunch.
Furthermore, again as far as chinese scammers look for Paypal as a form of payment. I know the Chinese scam websites do not think that anyone would catch on to this, but at one time a lot of Chinese businesses accepted Paypal as a payment option, but not now, a lot of them are really slick, they advertise they accept Paypal, but on their website you click a, "payment type" and guess what comes up, they accept Visa, MC, AEXP and WU, like I am going to give a Chinese company my CC information..
That is (SCAM), written all over it most of the time and not to mention what happened to Paypal as a form of payment. On top of that they have the nerve to have the Paypal logo on their website.
Finally, One lesson for me is that I do not do business online with Chinese businesses unless they accept Paypal. One thing I can say for Paypal, this company will freeze a merchants funds if (FRAUD) is involved.
One more thing I wanted to share with the salehoo family about Chinese supply scammers is that, everybody should check out the website very very closely, you will notice mispelling of words and grammer are DEAD giveaways. Also, look for any so called feedback and the word mispelling and names of the people are another DEAD giveaway.

First, do not forget that 95%-98% of the USA's resources, goods services and trading comes from China.

Did ten years of research yield that figure? Because it is not even remotely accurate. The US imports approximately $400 billion per year worth of various goods, services and capital resources from China, about 18% of total imports (and just under 3% of GDP.) The US imports almost as much from both Canada and the EU as from China.


Frank