By Sun Jin(Marlow), Chinese attorney at Law, Zhejiang Xinmu Law Firm, All rights reserved, republishing this article please indicate author and source of this article.

Dear Lawyer,

We are a manufacturer buying chemical products from China, recently we buy some chemical products from a Chinese supplier in Hebei province, but after we received the cargos and checked the materials and found it inferior quality. What we ordered is a chemical product of purity of 99%, but the cargo we received, after test it, the result is 26.75% only. Please advise what we can do via official legal actions.

Regards,

Dear sir or madam,

Very sorry to advise you one piece of bad news, it's very likely your case is one typical Chemical Fraud case. In past years till now, we had received many law enquiries similar to your case, and the victims are from Pakistan, India, USA, Bengal, Bhudan, Mexico and so on. And all these emails described similar chemical fraud cases, combining some works we had carried on, we can find below common points in all these cases:

1. The Chinese supplier is in north China, in Hebei province(like Shijiazhuang city), or Henan province(like Zhengzhou city), or Shanxi province(like Taiyuan city) or North of Jiangsu province(like Xuzhou city), and recently some of these scammers come to Hangzhou and even Ningbo in Zhejiang province to do their illegal business, and if you dig their information deeply, you can find that very possible at least one of their shareholders of the scammer company are from Hebei province(Handan city or nearby). So we can draw a map how present situation came into being, this type of Fraud business started from Hebei province (where Shijiazhuang is its province capital) and Tianjin, and now these guys moved to other cities in north China.

2. The cases are similar as well, you buy some chemical products from them, and they send you another type of chemical products which is much cheaper or same ordered product but with very-inferior quality. And this is how they make the money and crazy profits. For example, you buy 25 MT of 99% caustic soda flakes from them, they send you cargos of 25 MT caustic soda flakes but with purity of 26.37%. Another example, you buy 18 MT Polyvinyl Alcohol or Stearic Acid (Triple Pressed) from them, what they send to you is 18 MT sodium chloride (sea salt).

Available legal actions will be:

1. A lawyer's letter to give them pressures, threatening that we will sue them, or even file the case as one criminal case;

2. If the letter works, and they are open to it, we can carry on some official communications and negotiations with them and requesting them to refund you the money (come to one out-of-court agreement);

3. If the letter does not work, or we cannot reach any out-of-court agreement, we will prepare documents to file a criminal case in local police, or file a civil case in local court.

Before we start the work, we may need to do some official investigation over their registration files.