QUESTION: 

Dear Lawyer,

We are a manufacturer buying chemical products from China, recently we buy some chemical products from a Chinese supplier in Hebei province, but after we received the cargos and checked the materials and found it inferior quality. What we ordered is a chemical product of purity of 99%, but the cargo we received, after test it, the result is 26.75% only. Please advise what we can do via official legal actions.

Regards, 

ANSWERS and EXPLANATIONS: 

Dear sir or madam,

Very sorry to advise you one piece of bad news, it's very likely your case is one typical Chemical Fraud case. In past years till now, we had received many law enquiries similar to your case, and the victims are from Pakistan, India, USA, Bengal, Bhudan, Mexico and so on. And all these emails described similar chemical fraud cases, combining some works we had carried on, we can find below common points in all these cases:

1. The Chinese supplier is in north China, in Hebei province(like Shijiazhuang city), or Henan province(like Zhengzhou city), or Shanxi province(like Taiyuan city) or North of Jiangsu province(like Xuzhou city), and recently some of these scammers come to Hangzhou and even Ningbo in Zhejiang province to do their illegal business, and if you dig their information deeply, you can find that very possible at least one of their shareholders of the scammer company are from Hebei province(Handan city or nearby). So we can draw a map how present situation came into being, this type of Fraud business started from Hebei province (where Shijiazhuang is its province capital) and Tianjin, and now these guys moved to other cities in north China.

2. The cases are similar as well, you buy some chemical products from them, and they send you another type of chemical products which is much cheaper or same ordered product but with very-inferior quality. And this is how they make the money and crazy profits. For example, you buy 25 MT of 99% caustic soda flakes from them, they send you cargos of 25 MT caustic soda flakes but with purity of 26.37%. Another example, you buy 18 MT Polyvinyl Alcohol or Stearic Acid (Triple Pressed) from them, what they send to you is 18 MT sodium chloride (sea salt).

In a time, these scammers were so crazy, and they finally arouse the notice of local Police, when many foreigners came to report that they had been scammed by these scammers, and local police launched a compaign to fight against these scammers. Before this time point, police did not notice them, because these dispute looks really like normal business dispute, and China police is forbidden to be involved in normal business dispute, while their involvment may lead to corruption. So in this compaign, some scammers were thrown into prison, mostly for years only.

In recent years, we noticed there are some other fraud cases, also happened in Hebei province, but the products sold is not limited to chemical product any more, and they also sold other products, like metal products, A4 paper, whatever they sold, they play a same game, shortage delivery, or inferior quality, so as to make their crazy profit. We call these cases "Variation of Chemical Fraud Cases". Maybe these are same guys who were released from prison, such a possibility exists.

These scammers always tried to protecd their cases to be civil dispute case, which were actually criminal cases. Of course they were fear of being thrown into prison. So if you find the shortage delivery, or inferior quality, they may pretend to negotiate with you, and even sign some agreement on refunding you the money, but, we had never heard of it that any victim had got the refundings, before legal actions against them.

Available legal actions will be:

1. A lawyer's letter to give them pressures, threatening that we will sue them, or even file the case as one criminal case;

2. If the letter works, and they are open to it, we can carry on some official communications and negotiations with them and requesting them to refund you the money (come to one out-of-court agreement);

3. If the letter does not work, or we cannot reach any out-of-court agreement, we will prepare documents to file a criminal case in local police, or file a civil case in local court.

Before we start the work, we may need to do some official investigation over their registration files.