China Alerts

A few years ago we alerted our members and the general public of scams, primarily originated through the e-mails.  In the past few months, those scams seemed to have come back, and USCCC continues to receive reports from individual companies regarding those scams.

1. Certain small companies have received unsolicited inquiries from a Chinese website domain registration organization claiming that they have received a request from a third party to register a domain name – typically, something very similar to the domain name of the company they are attempting to scam – and upon investigating that third party, have found that they lack the proper documentation to prove ownership of the name/brand. The company asks you to hire them to register your domain name to prevent this third party from stealing your brand; conversely, if you do not respond, they threaten to accept the other company’s claim over the domain name as legitimate.

This is a scam designed to convince you to spend a small amount of money registering the many possible domain names that could be very similar to your company’s legitimate web domain. Once when you send them the money, you will NOT hear back from them.  None of those domain names in question will be registered under your name. 

2. Some smaller US manufacturers have received inquiries from Chinese companies claiming that they are looking to place a very large order ($1-5 million) of manufactured products (most of them are commodity type products that could be easily made in China), which could potentially double the revenues of the US manufacturers.  Some of those Chinese companies claim that they are subsidiaries of a very large, well known, state-owned enterprise that is legitimate.  They will then proceed to negotiate with the target on terms that are customary to trade practice.  When the negotiation is substantially complete, the Chinese company will ask its U.S. counterpart to visit them in China to ink the deal.  Sometimes, they will ask the U.S. company to bring gifts (custom practice in China) for the signing ceremony.  Once when the US executives arrive, the Chinese company will tell them a signing ceremony has been arranged but will find excuses to postpone the ceremony.  Then, the U.S. executives will be asked to give their Chinese host additional money either through wire transfer or advancements from the ATM or credit cards under either persuasion or coercion or both.  Surprisingly, although many U.S. executives are suspicious of such scams, they think that it is an opportunity that they cannot pass on.  They even spend tens of thousands of dollars in hiring attorneys or consultants to review the documents.  Surprisingly, many of those so called experts fail to alert them that those are scams.

Our advice is to ignore these mass mailing scams, and they should discontinue.

For further information regarding scams and specific companies, please contact our office at info@usccc.org or 312-368-9911.

To learn more about selling to China and doing business in China, please consider attending the 16th Annual U.S.-China Trade Conference on November 5 & 6, 2015 in Chicago. 

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