Truck Accessory Internet Retail Product Sales – How to Spot a Scam
So check this out. I’ve been doing this for the last 20 years. I sell automotive aftermarket products, particularly truck accessories for cargo management on the internet. I sell cargo management systems like the CargoCatch Pickup Truck Bed Organizer, custom cargo nets, gun boxes, tool boxes, cargo racks and the like, as well as a lot of other stuff.
Things have changed a lot on the internet. Amazon has taken over. It’s not organic anymore, for the most part. It’s all about paid advertising if you want to compete unless you nailed the organic stuff early on and were able to stay on top.
We were only able to stay on top for ‘custom cargo nets’ for several reasons, which I won’t go into now, but I will tell you this. There is one thing that has not changed…criminal activity on the internet.
Look, I’ve been doing this for a long time, so I know what I’m talking about. If you’re an online retailer, and you ever get an email like this, you’re in trouble if you ever think about entertaining the sale:
“Greetings,
Hope you are fine. Well I am in the market to purchase Underbody Truck Boxes and through my search I came across your address. Kindly let me know the models you have or a link to the ones you have in stock. Also want to know whether you consider credit card an option for payment? Write soon.
Best Regards,
Bill Reeder
Reeder Equipment Co.
Glendale, CA 91203, USA
First of all, Reeder Equipment Co is not a real company, but Reeder Distribution is and they’re in Texas. I would have called Reeder to advise them of this situation, and I probably will when I have time, but every company in the world is subject to this kind of fake harassment.
Bottom of the book here is that there are criminals using legitimate company information to scam their way into using stolen credit cards to purchase awesome products in our industry by simply finding a sucker who will fall into their trap. They just want you to email them back, let them know you sell ‘Underbody Truck Boxes’, then they’ll use their stolen credit cards to buy your stuff.
You run the card, it’s good, then they say ‘oh yeah, we’ll pick it up, you don’t have to ship’, and they send a freight forwarder, who is actually legit as far as you know. You get the money up front, sure, but then, after the bank finds out you’ve been scammed and you ran and charged a stolen card, you have to by law pay back the money because you failed to research it properly, and you’re out 10k or 20k or whatever, and those criminals have already closed their fake gateway, they have the product, and you’re left holding the bill while they sip margaritas in the Bahamas on their sailboat.
Look at this email. Who says ‘Greetings’ anymore. Nobody. ‘Hope you are fine?’ Not American. ‘Well I am in the market’? People in the automotive aftermarket especially customers don’t ever do this, they just jump right in and say something like ‘Do you have an Underbody Box for a 2002 F150 Short bed?’. They definitely don’t say ‘through my search’, etc… ‘Kindly’? Give me a break. ‘Models’? They’re all right there on the website and it indicates that we do accept credit cards, so why do they ask whether or not we accept credit cards? Everybody does. ‘Write soon’? WTF? How criminal can you get?
I’ll tell you one thing. If these people had me behind the scenes, we’d be raking in the money and all these products would ship, but I’m not a criminal. These days, it seems that being a criminal might pay, so maybe I need to switch careers, especially in this market.
Get a grip on your website and your email. I’ve actually never fallen prey to this except once when a very educated guy who actually knew a lot about his trucks in Malaysia conned me. We communicated for months about his vehicles before he placed an order for like $22K using multiple credit cards, but we only shipped the product from the warehouse to my location where we prepared the shipment for international shipment to Malaysia, and before we shipped it there, we called the banks and realized the credit cards were stolen, so we shut them down.
We did have to pay a restocking fee to the distributor in NY, but bottom line we never shipped those Jeep racks, so we got lucky. We lost about $400 on the restocking fee ultimately, but we continued to make money during those times so we were okay but this is the moral of the story. Read your emails carefully, and don’t get too hungry.
CargoCatch Current
