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Unfortunately, Schaffer is familiar with a
number of situations where distributors ful-
filled bogus orders and did not get paid.
“The emails have been coming around for
years but are more common now—and more
frequent,” she says. “There are distributors
who look at these emails and hesitate—with
good reason. These emails are sent directly to
suppliers and distributors—100 people at a
time—hoping someone will bite. Fortunately,
as a supplier, I do my due diligence to help
my customers. If you are unsure, send the
email to a supplier. Most suppliers who deal
with tech products have probably gotten the
email, too.”
She recommends distributors also do
their due diligence by researching the email
sender. If the email has an address for ship-
ment, look it up on Google Maps and see
what exists at that address. Call the phone
number—if your call goes to a nondescript
voicemail, that’s your first clue the order may
not be legitimate. “I got an order by email
with a ship-to address in Hackensack, New
Jersey—but they spelled it wrong,” says
Schaffer, a Jersey native. “The website was
nondescript, so I Googled it and found the
company and its address matched the one in
the email but the phone number wasn’t
working. I Googled the address, called the
company and asked for the person in the
email—there was no one there by that
name,” she says. “Don’t take an order just
because it looks good on paper. You may be
out thousands of dollars.”
HALO Branded Solutions (UPIC:
HBS) is one distributor on high alert to
these types of scams and trains its employ-
ees and account executives to know what to
look for. “We were lucky to catch on to the
scams fairly quickly several years ago,” says
Terry McGuire, CAS, executive vice presi-
dent. He adds that the company started to
notice a pattern in 2011. “We had chal-
lenges with a couple of orders and a couple
that actually went through, but the person
whose card was charged challenged the
charges. We realized it was creating vulner-
abilities with our credit card merchant serv-
ices agreement.” The company looked at the
pattern of fraudulent orders and sent a
notice to its sales force to point out the
characteristics of these fraudulent orders
and has since eliminated them. HALO’s
MAY 2015 •
PPB
• 23
How An Apparel Supplier Filters Go From No-Go
Kevin Shea, manager of the inside sales team at SanMar (UPIC: SNMR),
shares his company’s best practices to avoid order scams.
Is there an email scam situation you can recall? What happened and when
did you discover the order was fraudulent?
Shea:
SanMar only sells to authorized customers, so we were unaware that they
were involved in a scam until they let us know they had trouble with payments
from some of their end users. Our customers mentioned that they had accepted
and shipped orders, but were unable to collect payment once the products had
been delivered because the end user supplied stolen credit card information.
After a few of those calls, we realized that there might be a connection.
What characteristics do these orders have in common?
Shea:
We looked into the orders that our customers flagged as part of a scam
and noticed some commonalities between the reports. The orders were gener-
ally for large quantities of t-shirts (all in one or two sizes and in one or two col-
ors) and were shipped to common addresses and had common names associ-
ated with them.
What steps is SanMar taking to prevent scams?
Shea:
If our inside sales team notices a suspicious address or name we make it
a priority to contact the customer that placed the order and share our concerns.
We also have a dedicated inside sales team member who monitors the names
and ship-to addresses that had been identified as suspicious by our customers.
Scammers are always changing their tactics, but we do our best to provide our
customers with the latest information we have if we think their order might be
part of a scam.
How is SanMar advising its customers?
Shea:
We believe that it is a best practice to only accept orders from known or
verified end users. We advise our customers to trust their instincts and if some-
thing seems odd about an order, ask more questions to verify the legitimacy of
the customer and the order. A quick internet search can also be useful if other
businesses have reported problems with certain addresses or end users.
Similar to what we recommend to our customers, we train our staff to pay
attention to any orders that are strange or inconsistent with the typical customer
order. If we discover an unusual order that seems like it may be part of scam or
if we recognize that the ship-to address is one of the addresses flagged by cus-
tomers, we share that information with our customers so that they can make the
best decision.
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