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I'm working In sales for one company and we usually recieve a couple of mails like this per month:

Good Day!! This is [Person] from [Company] in [Location] We find out that your product are very nice and good quality.Our former supplier referred us to your company and we want to make an order immediately as we have branches in Asia & Europe.Please can you send your company catalogs to us with your best price so we can prepare our order specification and forward to you because our customers are already demanding for your products.Your early response will be much appreciated! Thanks and waiting for your reply

This makes absolutely no sense in context of what we are doing, as we are a custom manufacturer that has no specific product but rather manufacture stuff for other companies that then produce finished product and they are using very generic language and are naming everything we do as "product" and all these mails are worded almost the same with very few differences. What i would like to know is, what is their goal here? There are no atachments or anything to infect my PC, not even links to sites so what is their usuall next step?

RotV
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    My first instinct is that they want to order from you on credit and then not pay for the goods on arrival. They may also be Phishing for more information as the start of the social part of a bigger attack. This is not enough for an answer as I don't have anything other than speculation – MD-Tech Mar 06 '20 at 09:17
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    I think it's just the start of some sort of advance fee scam or similar. I get tons of these to my personal address so it's not even targeted just at companies - just sent to lists of email addresses harvested from databases. – Vicky Mar 06 '20 at 09:41

2 Answers2

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TTT is on the right track. Actually, the most common version on this scam runs like this:

  1. They place a large order and ask to pay by credit card
  2. The say you will be contacted by their freight forwarder, who will quote you on shipping, which is quite high.
  3. The buyer asks you to add the shipping charge to the bill.
  4. The freight forwarder insists on being paid by Western Union.
  5. The buyer gives you a credit card number (commonly asking you to split the amount over 3-4 cards) You do, and all the cards get approved - you get confirmation numbers and everything, so it seems legit.
  6. You use some of the money to wire the freight charge by Western Union to the freight forwarder.
  7. No one ever comes to pick up the goods.
  8. 2 months later you get a chargeback from the credit card company - the credit card numbers were stolen. You've already paid the "freight forwarder" who is the same scammer who placed the order.
Freiheit
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Andy Daniel
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I too have been receiving similar emails for years. My assumption is this is an attempt at a simple overpayment scam where they "accidentally" overpay and ask for some of the money back. They pay you with stolen or fake funds that are eventually reversed, but not until after you've paid them with real funds in a manner that can't be reversed.

The email blast is just a way to find some unsuspecting people to "buy" something from.

TTT
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