When buying online, especially in China, we must take into account the possibility of fraud. Phishing methods are often described:

• Fraud on a large order from China,
• Don’t be fooled by Chinese scams,
• Warning against contacting a Chinese company.

 

The scam scenario is always similar:

• The Chinese side contacts the Polish customer via the Internet.
• Establishing contact and negotiations run smoothly.
• After payment of the deposit or full payment for the ordered goods, the contact is lost.

 

A typical example of a thief company from the electronics industry is components-store.com or win-source.net which have a professional-looking website on the Internet with a wide range of electronic components. The companies accepts orders and responds to correspondence, but only until payment. Then – he forgets about the case and the phone answers “there is no such number”. This company is insolent enough to make national versions of its fraudulent store website available online, e.g.:

• Polish: https://www.components-store.pl/
• German: https://www.components-store.de/

Checking the address components-store.com in the domain search engine http://whois.domaintools.com/ reads gives an info:

IP Address 69.197.183.54 – 66 other sites hosted on this server Reverse IP.

Selected Reverse IP gives several other versions of the same fake shop:

• components-center.com
• components-mart.com
• components-mart.cz

and probably many others (but you have to pay for the full report). Admittedly, the author of these pages is very involved in the topic. It is interesting that registrants of these domains are: Alibaba Cloud Computing (Beijing) Co., Ltd!

 

How to check the credibility of a company from China or from another part of the world?

1. The first should be to check whether the company actually exists, and if so, whether the representative contacting us is authorized to act on its behalf.
2. The next step is to conclude a good contract, which however only makes sense for serious and large contracts, not for small purchases.
3. Ask the contractor about a business license, which every company (including China) must have. You should also check the reliability of the license presented.
4. It is worth checking the reliability of the phone number provided by the company, that is, get over a few USD and before sending the money, call and talk to the salesman contacting you.
5. It is suspected if the price of the product offered is significantly lower than the price of this product in other stores.
6. You should check information about the company on the Internet at supplierblacklist.com.
7. Examine the suspicious website of the store, e.g. at http://whois.domaintools.com/ or https://www.whois.net/ .
8. When paying, never provide your credit card details, use other payment methods.
9. Make sure the supplier’s name and bank account number match his business license and contract.
10. You can also check the credibility of the company through “yellow pages” – that is, various online telephone directories, where there are lists of phones, addresses and names assigned to company, e.g .:

• HKTDC (list of various search engines of companies from around the world).
• INFOCLIPPER.
• INFOBEL (this does not include China, but Hong Kong is there).
• Google Maps (the address entered allows you to check if the company’s headquarters exist and how it looks).

 

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