I have a successful ecomm business, doing seven figures of Revenue and six figures of profit. Today I was almost scammed out of 14,000. I got an inquiry to my company website, which I really only use as an online resume, but it has some products listed so it looks legit. The scammer asked me to get him a quote for some goods which I had a source for and could send to him.

He asked for a quote, I gave him a quote that would net me $2,000 profit so I was ready to pull the trigger. I was going to send him a PayPal invoice, but then he insisted on using QuickBooks. When he gave me his shipping address, something felt off so I decided to look up his company.

He claimed to run an Architecture Firm and had a website with a few example projects, but when I looked at the addresses of those projects many of the addresses didn’t even exist in Google maps. I sent him a request for business address and EIN to verify his company. He sent information that was tied to a company that sounded very similar to his but couldn’t be verified.

I assume the scam was for him too ask for expedited shipping on the goods, and then either issue a credit card charge back, or he was using a stolen credit card to begin with. That way, I get stuck with the bill for the goods while he gets to keep them and disappears.

It was the closest I’ve been to actually losing money in a scam and it was a good reminder both why those platforms like Amazon exist, and to double check information before I go through with a large order. It’s easy to get distracted by greed