Another Import Export Business lesson in the form of an a Question and Answer Post:
QUESTION:
I run a small wine export company in New Zealand and I am looking into exporting wine to Mali in Africa at the moment.
Contact is made, terms agreed on and now my customer says that I would need to open an non-residential account with his bank to enable him to transfer funds into my account in New Zealand. This sounds wrong to me and I have never been asked to do such a thing in the past. According to my customer this is an anti fraud measure introduced by the Malian government.
Could you please advise me whether or not this is true. Your help would be very much appreciated.
ANSWER:
I would suggest that you do a search in google for Mali + Fraud and/or Mali + scam - Mali appears to be yet another African cesspool of fraudulent activity.
My first suggestion is - Find a buyer not in a 3rd world country
One of the key factors that fraudsters play on their marks is the desperation of or greed for the completion of a sale or to get money.
How many things could go wrong with this?? You deposit funds to open an account, your client "supposedly" puts their funds into your account. If the bank is a legit one, how do you know your buyer does not have a friend working in the bank? How do you get your funds back?? The Mali bank is under NO obligations like your NZ banks have to their customers.
How many different ways does this have to sound like a scam before you simply deem it NOT worth the trouble?
Please do yourself a favor and read some of the listings google will give you on the suggested searches above - these people have honed the art of scam.
Is the sale really worth all the hassle if it is legit? Talk to a freight forwarder in NZ that deals with Mali and see if they have heard of this 'new' requirement. But bottom line, is it all worth it?? Cant' you find a buyer
elsewhere in a non- 3rd world country.
Have you done due diligence on your buyer, or the so-called bank you would need to deal with??
See the list of resources we recommend -
http://www.importexporthelp.com/company.htm#DUE-DILIGENCE
My advice goes back to my first suggestion - WALK AWAY.
Ron Coble
The International Business Times is the leading provider of international business news online.
Content Farms and the Exploitation of Information
A growing number of firms are aggressively pursuing the market for information by providing material that answers online searches and employing strategies so their material appears high in search results.
These enterprises are providing high quantity, low quality material on topics designed to produce many search hits and driven by the desire to make money from advertising received as high traffic sites. Some are proving quite successful.
Demand Media, for example, uses about 13,000 freelance writers to produce about 4000 articles a day for which it gains about 95 million unique visitors with more than 620 million page views monthly. Its eHow.com site alone gets about 50 million users. Ask.com, Yahoo and AOL are also engaging in the market.
When you make a search and are taken to answer.com, dictionary.com, wikianswers.com or hundreds of other sites providing such information to the public, you encounter this mass produced content. The business strategy is working and many of the sites are among the top 25 sites in the U.S.
These producers and a whole range of similar organizations are producing material in content farms that rely on freelancers who are paid as little as $1 an article or get no payment except for number of page views for their specific work. It is a throwback to the penny-a-word days of journalism in the 19th century. The firms are increasingly seeking video producers, photographers, and graphic artists to provide similar material at similar levels of compensation.
Even established news organizations and other enterprises are starting to use the syndicated material produced by such content farms. Organizations such as Hearst publications and National Football League are relying on them for some content that appears on their sites, for example.
The implications of these developments on the quality of Internet information and the prospects for professional writers are clear and hardly encouraging.
These enterprises are providing high quantity, low quality material on topics designed to produce many search hits and driven by the desire to make money from advertising received as high traffic sites. Some are proving quite successful.
Demand Media, for example, uses about 13,000 freelance writers to produce about 4000 articles a day for which it gains about 95 million unique visitors with more than 620 million page views monthly. Its eHow.com site alone gets about 50 million users. Ask.com, Yahoo and AOL are also engaging in the market.
When you make a search and are taken to answer.com, dictionary.com, wikianswers.com or hundreds of other sites providing such information to the public, you encounter this mass produced content. The business strategy is working and many of the sites are among the top 25 sites in the U.S.
These producers and a whole range of similar organizations are producing material in content farms that rely on freelancers who are paid as little as $1 an article or get no payment except for number of page views for their specific work. It is a throwback to the penny-a-word days of journalism in the 19th century. The firms are increasingly seeking video producers, photographers, and graphic artists to provide similar material at similar levels of compensation.
Even established news organizations and other enterprises are starting to use the syndicated material produced by such content farms. Organizations such as Hearst publications and National Football League are relying on them for some content that appears on their sites, for example.
The implications of these developments on the quality of Internet information and the prospects for professional writers are clear and hardly encouraging.
Labels:
AOL,
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compensation,
Hearst Corp.,
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