When shipping your products to an Amazon warehouse, there is a need for a freight forwarder. However, some scammers have taken advantage of the fact that you desperately need the services of freight forwarders and constantly disguise themselves as such to steal from you. This is usually by duplicating the name of a well-established freight forwarder and also by stealing the website. Therefore, you would be under the impression that you are in contact with the established forwarder but in an actual sense, you would be dealing with a scammer. This article will highlight a few ways that you could avoid getting scammed by freight forwarders.
GOOGLE THE COMPANY NAME
Thanks to technology, everyone’s first cue when we come across a new term or concept is to google it. The same can be done with freight forwarders, simply google the name. Once the results are displayed, you will be able to identify a few discrepancies, for instance, the company you are searching for does not exist, or perhaps, there is another existing company with a different website and perhaps different contact details from the ones you have been provided with. These are all indications that you are probably using a freight forwarder that is free-riding on the reputation of the established company, which will probably lead to you getting scammed.
CHECK THE URL
You must always pay particular attention to the URL of the freight forwarder you are using. Under normal circumstances, a company with a misspelled company name in the URL is a red flag.
Additionally, you must take note of the fact that established freight forwarders have their own domain. Therefore, if the freight forwarder you are considering is using free hosting for its site, then it is likely that you are dealing with a scammer.
Thus, you must pay attention to the URL to ensure it does not contain misspelled company names or it does not contain free hosting sites such as hub-spot, Wix, homestead, and many others.
CHECK THE LOGO QUALITY
A cloned logo will definitely have visible flaws, for instance, it may look pixelated, poorly altered, or with colours that do not match the inside letters or with closed spaces.
Such discrepancies are not noticeable at first glance, therefore, now that we have brought it to your attention, go and scan into the logo of your freight forwarder.
CHECK CONTENT CONSISTENCY ON THE WEBSITE
The content on a clone’s website is likely to be inconsistent and often refers back to the original website for the original and well-established company the scammer is trying to clone. This is the easiest way to know if you are dealing with a scam as there is no coherence when all you have is copied and pasted.
Additionally, cloned sites do not have all the blog content from the original website, therefore, you should check for blog backlog. This is because scammers are aware of the fact that you are only interested in new entries, and do not put up old blogs because of the time it takes to update all the links. In fact, some blogs may not even have updated additional information from the stolen information they have.
Therefore, you will notice that there is no backlog, no existing old links, and pictures for you to visit, and no updated information.
CONCLUSION
Identifying a scammer is not as easy as it sounds, without the background knowledge on the possible ways in which freight forwarders may scam you, you would land in the hands of many scammers and lose out on your money. Now that you are aware that they may scam you by copying websites and names, you can pay attention to the URL, company details and blog contents, if you find any of the red flags highlighted in this article, you will definitely run from that freight forwarder. It’s all about you paying close attention, good luck!