Last updated: 28 July 2026. This page is practical guidance from a trading company on the ground in Guangdong — it is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for your lawyer, your insurer or your bank's fraud team.
You have paid, the replies have stopped, and you may not have told anyone at your company yet. Nothing below assumes the worst. It sets out the four situations this usually turns out to be, the five things worth doing before anything else, and what someone standing at that address can and cannot establish for you.
What it usually is
Four situations, and they don't look different from your inbox.
- The factory is real and in trouble. Cash flow, a lost workforce, a bigger customer jumping the queue. They're avoiding you because they can't deliver and don't want to say so. Most recoverable — this is the situation where someone being physically present most often changes the outcome.
- You paid a trader who paid nobody. The entity you contracted with isn't the entity making the goods, and your money stopped somewhere in between. Recovery depends on whether the trader still has assets and a business worth protecting.
- The address doesn't exist. No facility, no registration matching what you were shown. This is fraud, and the window is short.
- Real factory, real dispute, silence as leverage. They believe you owe more, or that a spec change was your fault, and have stopped talking rather than argue. Frequently resolvable and frequently misread as fraud.
You cannot tell these apart from email. That's the whole problem — and it's the only thing an on-site visit reliably solves.
The first 48 hours
Do these before anything else.
- Stop sending money. Including any "small payment to release production." That request is a signal, not a solution.
- Preserve everything. Full email threads with headers, WeChat and WhatsApp history, the PI, the contract, bank records, every screenshot of their site and listings. Export it now — accounts and listings disappear.
- Check the registration. The entity name on your invoice, on gsxt.gov.cn. Compare it to the bank account you paid, the name on the PI and the address you were given. Mismatches between those four are the most common early evidence.
- Contact your bank immediately. Recall windows are measured in days, not weeks, and they close permanently.
- Don't threaten in writing yet. Anything you send now becomes evidence in a negotiation you haven't planned.
What we can actually do
Five steps, in the order they happen.
- Someone goes to the address. That is the verification visit — US$268, one factory, one visit — and we confirm the date when we quote. We establish whether the facility exists, whether it's operating, whether your goods exist, and what state they're in. Photographed, dated, documented.
- Registry and identity check. Who the entity actually is, whether it's still active, what its business scope permits, and whether it matches what you were told.
- Direct contact in Mandarin, in person. A Chinese-registered company standing in someone's office is a different conversation from a foreign buyer's unanswered email.
- An honest assessment. What's recoverable, what isn't, and whether pursuing it costs more than it returns. We'll tell you when the answer is to stop spending.
- Re-source if that's the outcome. Sometimes the fastest route to a season being saved is a different factory, not a recovered deposit.
What we won't tell you
That we can get your deposit back. Nobody can know that before someone has looked, and any firm that says otherwise on a landing page is selling you the feeling rather than the outcome.
That the visit will be good news. Roughly half the value of going is finding out early that it won't be, while you still have time to re-source instead of waiting.