Fake Tracking, Failure To Deliever

We received an email from a Pakistani company, Zinsex International, on 28 February 2009 offering their manufacturing services to us.

As we were facing problems with our main supplier in China at that time, we decided to engage more suppliers to manufacture our products for us in order to minimise the disruption to our business whenever Q.C or manufacturing error arises. Thus, we decided to explore using Pakistani suppliers when we received the email from the above mentioned company.

They seem professional and knowledgeable with their replies when we ask them on some technicalities related to our industry so we were quite pleased with them. We therefore requested a price list of the goods we want to make and they in return offered slightly lower prices for all items. The price difference was not significant to make us suspicious as it was mainly between the region of US$1.00-2.00.

As we have never worked with any Pakistani companies before we didn't know where to go to verify the legitimacy of Pakistani companies. Finally, we got the answer from the forums in Alibaba.com on the documents to request for in order to verify Pakistani companies. We requested the documents from them on 4 March 2009 through email and we finally received scanned copies on 12 March 2009. They told us the 8 days delay was due to some religious holiday in Pakistan.

We started calling up the banks this company has accounts with to check if they really do have accounts with those banks. The result was positive and so we move on to emailing the government bodies responsible for issuing to those documents which the supplier sent to us. As expected, we did not get any reply from any of them despite numerous emails.

Our communication with them went on with them for the following months focusing mainly on the technical aspects of production. 2 artworks were sent to them in late April or early May for them to produce samples for us to check on their workmanship and material quality. We also decided to send over a few of our product samples for their reference to the material we need sometime in May 2009, before we begin on production.

We got an email from them on 1 June 2009, informing us they already received our samples and will begin sourcing materials and matching the workmanship standard found on our samples.

We sent them another email on 3 June checking with them on the progress of the samples they were supposed to make for us as it has been almost a month since we sent them the artwork. We decided to give them a another week as they said their fabric department was in the process of reproducing the fabric we needed because they don't have the our fabric type in stock.

On 12 June 2009, we received an email from them informing us of a death in their family therefore the factory would be shut for the next 2-3 days! We sent them a email on 16 June to check on the progress again and they claim the samples will be finished in the next few days.

Due to the numerous queries from our distributor/dealers on the progress of our new product line for 2010 we sent the Pakistani supplier another email on 19 June to ask them for a delivery date of the samples. Their reply came on 20 June informing us they already sent out the samples.

We waited for more than week to see the samples but they never show up. Many email was sent and phonecalls to them were made on 8 July demanding the truth from them and the return of our product samples. 10 July, they replied and claimed they were facing some internet connectivity problems thus the delay in reply. They also provided us with a EMS tracking number which we found out later to be fake! They claimed the samples were lost in transit and would make us another set of samples. A set of photos was also attached to show us the "lost" samples which they claimed they had sent out in late June. But upon checking on the EXIF data on the photos, we found the photos were taken on 9 July! How can that be possible?

From then on, we have not heard any news from them, all email and phones calls not answered.

Note: We found this company had already scammed many buyers using the following search engine keyword, Zinsex Fraud.
This company also uses many other names and have listing on many B2B sites like alibaba.com, tradekey.com etc. They have since been removed from most of these B2B sites.

Bank account information of this fake company,

Bank name:
HSBC BANK MIDDLE EAST LIMITED
ADDRESS
AZIZ SHAHEED ROAD, SIALKOT CANTT. PAKISTAN
ZIP CODE
51310

ACCOUNT Title, (Beneficiary Name):
Zinsex international

Bank acct. number:
009-007006 -001

EMIRATES GLOBAL ISLAMIC BANK LIMITED,

ADDRESS
Paris Road Branch, Sialkot, Pakistan
ZIP CODE
51310

ACCOUNT Title, (Beneficiary Name):
Zinsex international

Bank Acct. number:
01002-12528-016