Infinite Chemicals RSA offered chemical products for sale, took our money, and then failed to deliver anything once they received payment. We are posting this notice to help other companies avoid losing money to this organization. Here are the details.
We received an email message in response to a post we made for the supply of certain chemical products. We then received an email from a person representing themselves as Donald Spike from Infinite Chemicals RSA as shown in the image below.
They required a 30% prepayment and communicated very regularly until they received our payment in their bank. From that point forward, they have not responded at all. They used the following email address in communicating: [email protected]. They referenced the website www.infinitechemrsa.com in their email and they listed a complete phone number, skype ID, fax number, and WhatsApp number, along with a complete address that is a real address.
It is difficult to verify whether a supplier is legitimate or not, so we have put together the list below to assist other companies in verifying new suppliers:
- Does the company have a website? In this case, Infinite Chemicals RSA has one.
- Does the website have an SSL certificate? Companies have to pay for SSL, so having one is a favorable thing. This was also the case in our assessment.
- Does the company require prepayment? Requiring prepayment is common for many suppliers as they do not want to waste time and want to ensure they can trust you as the buyer. A Letter of Credit (LC) ensures protection for both parties, but it involves fees and can pose a hassle, especially for a small deal. In our case, our supplier refused to accept shipment by LC, so we decided to risk a 30% prepayment for a single shipment. (We originally planned to order 10 containers and chose to do just 1 to minimize the risk).
- Is the person doing the communication sending messages from the domain listed? Again, for our example, the answer was “yes”.
- Is the company registered to do business in the country where it is listed? Again, for our example, this was another “yes”.
- Can the company provide trade references in your country? In this example, the answer was no.
- Can the company provide trade references in other countries? If so, email can be used to validate the references, but the email domain should match the reference company website. In this case, we did not try to validate company references.