Buyer safety
How to avoid scams when buying used machinery online
Almost every cross-border used-equipment fraud fails at the same point, and it is not the point most buyers watch. This is what actually protects you, in the order it protects you.
The one structural rule
If you remember nothing else from this page: never pay in full before the goods have been checked. Not a discount for prepayment, not “our policy for new customers”, not because the machine is about to be sold to someone else. Every large used-machinery fraud runs on a single full payment made against photographs.
Everything below is a way of making that rule hold up under pressure, because the pressure is the point — a good fraud does not look like a fraud, it looks like a deal that is about to disappear.
Urgency is the tell. A real seller with a real machine can wait a day for you to inspect it. “Another buyer is paying tonight” is the oldest lever in the trade, and it is aimed exactly at the step that would have saved you.
Six checks, in order
- Ask for a live video call on the machine, under power. Not a recorded video — a live call, where you choose where the camera points. A recording can be of any machine, anywhere, at any time. A seller who cannot or will not do this has answered your question.
- Ask for the machine plate and serial number on camera. Then require both in the contract. A serial number ties a specific physical machine to a specific piece of paper, and it can be checked against the manufacturer’s records.
- Check the company, not the website. Any website can be built in a weekend. Ask for the registered company name and registration number, then look it up in the relevant company registry. Ask whether the address is a workshop or an office.
- Check that the payee matches the seller. The bank account name must be the company named as seller in the contract. A personal account, a third-country account, or a “payment agent” is where the transaction ends.
- Split the payment. Deposit to reserve, balance after the pre-shipment check. If a seller refuses to split, they are refusing to be checked.
- Appoint an inspector for the second check. SGS, Bureau Veritas, TÜV or your own freight forwarder. It costs a few hundred dollars against a five-figure machine, and a seller’s reaction to the suggestion is itself information.
Warning signs, ranked by how often they turn out to matter
| Signal | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| Refuses a live video call, offers recordings instead | The machine is not in their possession, or is not in the condition described |
| Payment to a personal or third-party account | Highest-risk signal there is. Stop here |
| Price well below every other quote for the same tonnage and year | Either a machine with an undisclosed fault, or no machine |
| Photographs that appear on other websites | Reverse-image search them. Takes thirty seconds |
| Pushes to close before you can inspect | Manufactured urgency; the deadline is theirs, not the market’s |
| Will not put the serial number in the contract | Nothing binds the paperwork to a physical machine |
| Company details vague, address is an office suite | Broker at best. Ask who actually holds the machine |
Not every signal is fraud. Plenty of honest brokers do not hold their own stock, and plenty of good machines are priced low because the seller needs the floor space. The signals matter when they cluster — and the response is always the same: slow down and inspect.
What a safe transaction looks like from your side
- You looked at two or three machines from more than one supplier, live, before deciding.
- You have a recording of the inspection and a written condition report that names what could not be tested.
- You have a contract with the model, serial number, year, configuration list, refurbishment scope, warranty terms and default liability in it.
- You paid a deposit, not the full price, to a company account matching the contract.
- You or an inspector you appointed checked the machine again before the balance was released.
- You received a copy of the bill of lading to verify before the original was couriered.
If all six are true, the remaining risk is ordinary commercial risk — a machine that turns out to need more work than expected — not the risk of losing the money entirely.
If something has already gone wrong
Move quickly and in this order. Contact your bank immediately and ask about recall of the wire — the window is short and measured in hours or days, not weeks. Gather everything: chat logs, e-mails, the contract, the invoice, the bank confirmation. Report it to the police in your own country and, if the seller is in China, to the local Public Security Bureau and the platform where you found them. If the goods shipped but do not match, do not accept the documents; talk to your forwarder about holding the cargo before it is released.
None of that is a substitute for the sequence above. Recovery rates on international wire fraud are poor, which is exactly why the protection has to sit before the payment rather than after it.
Questions
Questions buyers ask about this
Is a letter of credit safer than a T/T deposit and balance?
It can be, for a large order — the bank releases payment only against the document set you specified, so a mismatch in the documents stops the payment. It costs more in bank charges, takes longer to set up, and it protects the documents rather than the machine: a seller can present perfect documents for a machine that is not what you inspected. Use an L/C for size, and still do the pre-shipment check.
Is an escrow service worth using?
For used industrial machinery it is rarely practical — few escrow providers handle this value and this kind of goods, and the ones that offer to are themselves a common fraud vector. A staged payment to a verifiable company account, with an inspection before each stage, achieves the same protection through structure rather than through a third party you also have to trust.
How do I verify a Chinese company actually exists?
Ask for the company’s full registered name in Chinese and its Unified Social Credit Code, then check it on the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System. Confirm the bank account name matches that registered name exactly. Then confirm the physical reality separately — a live video call from the workshop, or a visit.
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Ask for a live inspection before anything else is discussed. That is the check that matters, and it costs you nothing.