First off...This is NOT A TRADE LEAD -- I am in teaching mode here. I have come across so many people who simply have no idea how to research a company, so I'm going to go through a scenario using my own company as an example of how to research a company. It is not a promotion for my company, just an honest effort to teach people how to research BEFORE they get scammed.



Okay, so you get approached by someone on Trade Manager or you contact a company you find in sell leads or someone has contacted you from your buy lead. Here are some examples of ways to easily identify whether they are frauds/scammers or not. This is NOT foolproof. Do your due diligence and you will be less likely to get scammed. Follow along at each step (if you care to).



Before contact or at the time when contact has been made:

Identify the company name.

Let's say that I contacted you. You need to do a search on Alibaba to find my company profile.

Go to the home page of Alibaba.com

Type the name of the company in the search box ? Please take note, sometimes less is more in regards to what the results output will be ? You may want to only put Two Rivers as your search term, you will likely come up with more results.

Choose Companies from the drop down box.

Click search.

Here are the results of that search (for Two Rivers Trading):

http://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?Type=&SearchText=Two+Rivers+Trading&IndexArea=company_en