I attempted to send $1200 via Western Union for a variety of sample products from China. When I attempted to process the payment online, a window came up telling me that my payment was unsuccessful. I called to ask Western Union why the payment didn't go through and was told that the person whose name I was attempting to send money to was on a watch list of scammers. I emailed Sophia (the sales manager) about what had happened and she insisted that couldn't be possible. I suggested several alternate methods of payment but she was insistent that payment was best made via Western Union. While I didn't actually lose any money to Sophia, there are several clues as to why Sophia is a scam:
1) The website of www.hkweihai.com is basically identical to a known scam with the web address of www.szcgbl.com. When I asked Sophia why her company's website was identical to that of www.szcgbl.com, she said she had never heard of the szcgbl company. And yet when you look at the company addresses showing on their email, the address for hkweihai.com is 21F, Saige Building, Huaqiang, Shenzhen and the address for szcgbl.com is: 18F, Saige Building, Futian Area, Shenzhen. So two companies with an identical website are 3 doors away from each other and the sales manager of one of the companies has never heard of the other. Yeah, right.
2) I had actually been scammed by David, of another company (www.talentb2b.com). Both David and Sophia (with www.hkweihai.com) were evasive in their connection to www.alibaba.com, which is where I was sourcing quotes from. There is an escrow option when doing a deal with any company on the alibaba site, but Sophia didn't want to do an escrow deal.
3) Not only was I offered prices at a fraction of what I was quoted by other Chinese suppliers, but I was given free shipping, a free iPad 2 wifi 64gb, and my order of $1280 worth of product was rounded down to $1200. That was all a little bit too generous.
4) I offered to come and collect $10,000 worth of product, then was given an address different from the ones on her email.
5) Sophia's email is patterned after Steven's email (from www.szcgbl.com) which has already been reported as a scam. How these people get my email address to respond to when I write only to companies displayed in Alibaba is something I still don't know.
6) Another one with the identical pattern as the above two is www.xmriqin.com. Their address is listed as 8F Saige Building, Shenzhen. Well what do you know? It's in the same building as two other scammers?
I wonder if some enterprising individual in China is selling a kit for $100 with detailed instructions on how to scam Westerners?
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