With such a languishing domestic market, it is easy for our SMEs to try the path of foreign trade.
But beware of scams and scam attempts, always lurking. One of our readers, owner of a start-up in the building materials sector, told us that he had been contacted by a self-styled business intermediary, residing in Iraq, who offered him a purchase operation by a government counterpart in the country. Since these are materials that have also received awards for innovation, he claimed to have learned about them through sector exhibitions and reports from trade associations. The amount of the order was many millions of dollars (much more than the annual turnover of our client company), complete with documentation and contracts sent by e-mail and telephone numbers and internet addresses of the purchasing staff. Payment for the supply would have taken place in advance, provided that the seller undertook, upon receipt of the payment, to retrocede a brokerage commission (of a reasonable amount) in favor of this intermediary.
Too many things did not add up in this invitation and left us extremely suspicious. With a quick investigation on the internet we noticed some glaring flaws in this construction and also a complaint of a scam almost equal to the damage of a Spanish company. So we advised the reader company to quickly decline the invitation. Without going into the details of this single operation, let's get together some principles of caution of a general nature to be observed on occasions like this:
1. The probability that a practically unknown client contacts me to entrust me a contract of several million dollars (if mine is a small company), and moreover by entrusting me with a direct assignment without tender procedures, I am equal to the most beautiful actress in the world (I leave the choice to you) to call me home to invite me to dinner tonight. Dreams are wishes, but sometimes they can turn into nightmares. What's more, in a country like Iraq, which has been subjected to a strict embargo for over twenty years, and where all reconstruction orders are carefully monitored and subjected to tender procedures;
2. With modern means of communication there is no difficulty in reproducing a letterhead or some official logo on a file, nor in opening e-mail addresses on some compliant server with names similar to those of a country's official entities. It is obvious that whoever replies to these e-mails or to the telephone contacts of the contacts agrees with the possible scammers. However, it is also easy to know by whom and where a certain site was opened, and therefore to trace the origin of the scam (in the case in question, the address was registered in the United States, and had nothing to do with the Iraqi government);
3. All payments to and from Iraq are subject to strict embargo procedures, established both by the OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) of the US Treasury Department (see the website http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/pages/iraq.aspx) and by the European Commission;
4. All payments to and from Iraq must transit through the Trade Bank of Iraq and have a documentary credit as payment instrument. This gives us a further guarantee, namely the control of our Italian bank over the entire payment procedure and the regularity of the Iraqi side's work. The same thing happens in other countries subject to embargo procedures;
5. It is better to avoid, in the initial contacts with "strange" counterparts, or ones we don't trust, to release letterheads, logos and above all signatures of the legal representatives of our company, which can be used to plot new scams against us.
