Where buyers actually lose money — payment redirection more often than fake factories — and the checks that can be completed before a deposit leaves your account.
The common loss is a redirected payment
The pattern repeats. A familiar contact emails revised bank details shortly before a deposit is due, citing an audit, a frozen account or a new company entity. The mailbox has usually been compromised, or the domain spoofed by a character or two, and the money goes to an account that was never the supplier's. The defence is procedural rather than technical: the receiving account name must match the registered Chinese name of the company on your contract, and any change to banking details is confirmed by voice on a number you already held — never a number supplied in the same message that requested the change.
- Beneficiary name must match the contracting entity's registered name, character for character
- Treat a personal account, a third-party name, or an offshore account for a mainland entity as a stop rather than a formality
- Confirm every change of bank details by phone, on a number you held before the request arrived
What can be established before the deposit
A mainland Chinese company has an 18-digit unified social credit code on its business licence, tied to a registered name, a legal representative, a registered capital figure and an approved business scope. That record confirms the company exists and what it is licensed to do. It does not confirm that the company manufactures anything: a registered trading office and a factory look identical on paper, and the difference changes what a price means and who you can escalate to when something goes wrong. The gap worth closing before money moves is the one between the entity on the contract, the address on the licence, and the place your goods would actually be made.
- Check the unified social credit code, the registration status, and whether the business scope covers your category
- Establish whether the counterparty manufactures or resells — neither is disqualifying, but the answer changes the relationship
- Confirm the production address separately from the registered address, by visit or live walk-through
The signals worth slowing down for
Fraud rarely announces itself; it applies time pressure. A price well below every other quote, a deposit demanded before the specification is settled, reluctance to be seen on an unscheduled video call, an order accepted without a single question about tolerance or packaging, a company registered months ago quoting capacity it could not have built — each is weak alone and telling in combination. Platform badges do not substitute for any of it: a membership tier records that a supplier pays for a shop, and a verification report covers only the items it names, on the day it was carried out. None of these checks make recovery possible afterwards. Funds transferred internationally are difficult, slow and often impossible to recover, which is the whole argument for spending the time before the transfer rather than after it.
- An unscheduled video walk-through is harder to stage than a scheduled one
- A supplier that never questions your specification may not have read it
- Verification lowers exposure; it does not guarantee an outcome, and nobody credible will tell you otherwise
Authoritative references
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