In many ways you only have yourself to blame.
You should never have accepted the order for goods and services without
either some upfront payment or escrow type services. Even an
International Letter Of Credit would have gone some way to helping you
avoid this hole.
Have you tried reclaiming the property from the end user? Technically
its still yours (your invoice did say that right?) until its paid for.
David Liu wrote:
Dear All In The Asterisk Business Community,
We have been a victim of this company called CGC Technologies (HK)
Limited (www.cgc.com.hk) and I believe the community deserves to know
about this.
Earlier this year in March, we were approached by Kent Wong and Billow
Li of CGC purchasing Digium hardware and Asterisk consultancy services
for "resell" to a customer in China.
The story basically goes about CGC acting as the middleman and took our
hardware and services to turn into cash and run away. To make the long
story short, we delivered hardware and integration services in May 2005
to CGC's customer. The system went live and CGC's customer accepted the
system and paid CGC in full. Since then, we have been chasing for
payment from CGC countless times. The standard reply from Kent Wong
(General Manager) was always "We will bank-in payment to you next
week"). Of course when next week came, we didn't receive a single dime.
Finally, after countless attempts, we received a post-dated cheque on
9th August, 2005, see (http://fraud.deltapath.com/dishonoredcheque.jpg)
Unfortunately, that cheque failed to clear on the cheque date as they
have insufficient funds in their bank account. (Source: Phone
conversation with Anny Choi, Administration & Accounting, CGC, 7th
September, 2005)
International Collection Agency reported to us that CGC's Hong Kong
office address is only a virtual office address that is only used for
receiving mailings. And the office in Guangzhou, China has been shutted
down early November by court bailiff, recovering the property for the
landlord. We were told by the Management of that office building that
CGC failed to pay rent for several months already.
These guys are very clever in finding loopholes in the system. Instead
of having the cheque dishonored due to insufficient funds, they would
make a stop payment to the cheque and then claim the item was never
delivered or doesn't work. This changes the case from criminal to
civil. This means the police can't help you (at least not in Hong Kong).
They are now re-advertising themselves again on the Wiki and presenting
themselves as digiumchina.com. So I'd like the community to be aware of
this and don't get burnt like we did. Whether you are a customer or a
supplier, do beware!
Scammers Involved:
Kent Wong, (based in Hong Kong), Mobile/Cell: +852 96475105
Billow Li, (based in Guangzhou, China), Mobile/Cell: +86 13929562515
Peter Ong, (based in Singapore), Mobile/Cell: +65 94501178
And a word to the wise, it is important to seperate Sales and Finance
even in a small business. With rigid control enforced by a non sales
person, you avoid situations like above where a scammer can not sweet
talk you to accept less deposits and deliver first before payment.
Seasons Greetings to the Asterisk community.
David Liu
Deltapath
Hong Kong
--
Mark, G7LTT/KC2ENI
Randolph, NJ
http://www.g7ltt.com
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