There are thousands of people out there who believe they can buy cheap brand name electronics and textiles from the other side of the planet as easily as they go grocery shopping. Believe it or not. As far as I know (I should mention that I am not in this business myself so I'm no authority) the idea that you can always get the latest Nokia/Sony/Apple gadget cheap from is just a dumb get-rich-quick myth that gets thousands of people scammed. There is no such thing as cheap branded electronics from , but there are hundreds of scam sites feeding off this dumb myth. The chance that the one you found is real is practically zero, all other things being equal.
If you are looking to do business in (or anywhere else for that matter) you actually need to learn something about international trade, about the market you are entering, and especially how to make sure you get what you pay for. This is not easy,
As for the common scams you will find in
, the most popular is of course websites selling all kinds of brand name consumer electronics at below market prices. These are always fraudulent, and they operate on most B2B and auction sites.Some of them like to excuse themselves with that the goods got stuck in customs somewhere, or just send a fake Nike shoe regardless of what you order. Some will send non-working tracking numbers. The city of Putian, and the Fujian district, is somewhat infamous for fraud both in and internationally. It's possible to find plenty of scam companies from this area, many of their websites advertise fake Nike shoes in combination with electronics.
All Chinese sites selling all kinds of designer clothing will only deliver counterfeit items. Some of them will freely admit this, others will not. Many of these will also scam you, sometimes only depending on which salesperson you are talking to. These companies are operating outside of the law already so they have little incentive to actually deliver anything, and frankly it's a lot easier to just scam people. They know you can't really complain either way, as long as you realized the goods were fake. Trading in counterfeit items is after all not legal. You may get your items seized by customs and face legal action. Seeing the difference between a fake faker and a "real" one is often very difficult as the fakers use similar methods as the scammers to stay anonymous. Either way, I'm not personally interested in the difference, and I have no wish to assist people with this type of business. We have no way of knowing if people will try to pass these items off as authentic or not.
Many other types of counterfeit items can also be found in , e.g. memory chips, golf clubs, Ipods and mobile phones (often including models that have yet to be released). They will always claim that the quality is "AAA+" which can mean half of them are broken. If they claim that the items are authentic the price will often be thereafter as well, but you will still only receive fake junk. Don't expect them to honor any guarantees they give you unless you have the resources to hire a couple of Chinese lawyers to go after them. You really need to check them out so you know who you are dealing with.
It should be mentioned that there are a few legitimate companies selling refurbished electronics from
. These can be cheap, but for good reasons, and there might be quality issues that you need some proper commercial due diligence to deal with.
But the fact is, beyond the obvious scammers and fakers, there is no easy way to check out a Chinese company unless you speak Chinese. Even real Chinese companies will often use
Western Union or Money Gram for smaller payments, and use free email addresses, for example. Scammers (and fakers) will invariably only offer WU, MG and a personal bank account for payment methods, some also have PayPal. Real companies should have a company bank account and will also accept L/C. But there are exceptions to this, and these complexities of international trade is not something we are qualified to enlighten you on.
Recovering money lost to fraud in
is very difficult, am saying this from my own experience of more than 20 years in business in china market .just like anywhere else. You would need to report it in person to the police there, or hire a legal representative, which won't be worth it unless you lost more than at least a few hundreds of thousand dollars. you can find some advice from a Chinese lawyer. ( we loosed nearly half million $ just to recover our clients products) nothing happened and our money never come back again.
B2B sites like TradeKey.com, Alibaba.com, EC21.com all have some sort of paid members who are verified in various ways. For your own safety you should not assume that this means anything at all, especially if they joined the site very recently. And especially if they are selling cheap branded electronics, there is always very good reason to be suspicious as it's not unusual for scammers to be paid members on these sites. If you read the terms & conditions, disclaimers etc... on the sites you will most likely find that they do not make any guarantees that a paid member is legitimate or supplies authentic products. If you intend to start a business it can be a good idea to start reading the fine print. The practice of phishing is also not unheard of, you have to be sure you are dealing with the real company and not some scammer who stole their password.
Happy Trading for all of you.