Net-30 and Empty Promises
The Supplier Scam, Fake Purchase Orders, and Crooked Brokers
A supplier looks legitimate. The quotation makes sense. The purchase order appears routine. Then the bank details change, the broker starts applying pressure, the shipment documents stop matching, or the goods that arrive are nothing like the goods that were approved.
Commercial fraud rarely announces itself with a single obvious warning. It works by borrowing credibility from ordinary business processes: Net-30 terms, invoices, purchase orders, trade agents, freight paperwork, company registrations, marketplace profiles, and familiar payment requests.
Net-30 and Empty Promises shows you how to examine those processes before a weak link turns into a costly loss.
Inside, you will learn how to:
- Map a supplier transaction from first contact through final acceptance, so risk does not disappear between departments.
- Verify legal identity, authority, capability, bank details, and intermediary relationships through independent evidence.
- Recognize fake or manipulated purchase orders, vendor impersonation, account-change fraud, copied legitimacy, phantom inventory, and broker conflicts.
- Separate useful credit information from the appearance of legitimacy created by registrations, D-U-N-S records, websites, and directory listings.
- Design safer first orders with clear specifications, samples, milestones, inspections, acceptance criteria, and bounded exposure.
- Reconcile invoices, shipping documents, freight records, payment instructions, and delivery evidence before approving the next step.
- Build callback rules, approval thresholds, evidence logs, incident-response procedures, and repeatable procurement controls.
- Respond more effectively when goods do not arrive, arrive wrong, or a payment may have been diverted.
The book also examines public business-email-compromise patterns and shows what documented cases can teach without pretending that every fraud follows the same script. Industry-specific chapters cover construction materials, food and cold-chain purchases, apparel and soft goods, and industrial equipment or aftermarket parts.
This is a practical book for owners, procurement staff, operations teams, accounts-payable personnel, importers, and anyone who has to decide whether a new supplier deserves more trust, more money, or neither.
The goal is simple: make the next commercial decision from evidence rather than pressure.
Build the controls before the deal tests them.