- International Trade Fraud -

There are many international thieves out there who will do everything they can to steal or cheat the rest of us who make honest living. We recently received a fraud inquiry e-mail from someone in Nigeria with the following content:

"Hello, This is XXX from Nigeria wanting to be your business partner by purchasing some of your products to Nigeria in order to develop our business. We will be very happy if you can send the following items to us through FedEx, UPS, DHL. List the product you have in the store for me and the price of it with the product name. We will be very happy if you calculate the shipping charges to Nigeria and give us the feedback on the types of credit cards you accept for payment. Hope to hear from you soonest.  XXX International."

Rule #1 when doing international trade: Never accept credit cards, unless you've known your oversea suppliers and absolutely trust them. In this example, this guy was still using the oldest trick in the book by sending out hundreds of such inquiry e-mails everyday hoping they could cheat someone out of it.

This is what happens. Somehow the thieves get their hands on a victim's credit card information. Then they plan to use stolen credit cards to order whatever they want from foreign suppliers. If an innocent supplier accidentally accepts the stolen credit card and sends out the merchandise, it is all over! First, the rightful owner of the credit card, when the discrepancy is found out, will file for fraud dispute. Believe us, the innocent merchant will NOT and can NOT win the dispute. Second, the innocent merchant lose the merchandise forever. It is double-edged penalty. Very severe indeed!

Rule #2 be on guard when dealing with 3rd world countries. Countless number of frauds have been committed by thieves from those countries. In fact, most experienced businesses would refuse to even deal with inquires coming from certain countries.

Just by looking at the content of this letter, we know immediately it is mass sent with only one intention in mind. By the way, the guy who sent this inquiry e-mail use one of those public email, yahoo, where there is no way to trace the thieves' true identity.