 Hello everyone and welcome and today we are discussing what to do when someone sends you an unsolicited offer, an unsolicited proposal. What should you do? Hey, you just registered in SAM and all of a sudden you get registered and now someone reached out to you and say, hey, I have this RFP RFQ that I want you to give us a price on and it's not published. What should you do? That's exactly what happened to one of our users and this is the question that they asked me. It's on the screen. This afternoon, I just received an invitation for an unpublished contract. And so again, I don't know where to begin. However, I am more and then determined on what to go where to go next. Excuse me. May I ask for your guidance on steps to how to proceed with that? Now, what do you think that I said to this particular person? Well, if you have not guessed already what I said, go back and take a look at some of my previous publications and one in particular that I like to point out, which is where Dion was nearly scammed out of $90,000. That's right. Dion almost got scammed out of $90,000 because she thought to just like the person listening to this, like, are you watching that? Wow, I am so special that someone from the government reached out to me and now they want to give me an opportunity. Wow, that is great. However, what happens is this. This was the email that Dion sent to me originally and it says here, not sure if anyone else fell for this, but I want to warn you and others, I received what looked like a legitimate RFQ from Dr. John Farrell at the US Arctic Research Commission. Since that didn't sound like a real agency, I looked him up. Turns out that Mr. John Farrell was the ex director and I placed my bid. Someone claiming to be Dr. Farrell called me to let me know he had sent a PO. I began the process of getting the $90,000 worth of electronics together. Their first one of the orders arrived at the destination specified on the PO and the recipient had no knowledge of the purchase. I contacted Dr. Farrell whom I'd only heard from on the phone once by email and he said he was expecting a tracking number from me to alert the recipient. Not long after I got a call from an agent at the FBI, needless to say, I was sick to my stomach. Yeah, how many of us would be sick to our stomach? And so again, you could come over here to this particular episode and listen to the full clip that I have on our channel was published in 2019 and only 500 people watched it. Why? Because we think it can't happen to us and we think we're not vulnerable. But listen, Dion thought the same thing. Hold on. Let's real quick. So I thought, let me Google Seagate hard drive and see what they cost. Okay. And so I saw that, you know, X numbers drive across this, so I added 15% and I got that never done it before. So I had a 15% thing and that would be my profit and then I would, you know, turn it around and send it to the sky. So I did that. And I didn't think anybody, I figured I probably wouldn't even hear from him again because I'm thinking whoever Seagate is, they can offer them a better price and I can't know why I wasn't buying from him because I didn't think I'd hear anything about it. So it wasn't long after that, I'm going to get maybe a week or a week or so later, the same company sent an amended purchase order for this time instead of having just the hard drive, they asked for something called a circuit pro, I believe. Okay. So again, you can feel free to listen to the entire clip, but ultimately what they did was they did a really good job of impersonating this particular gentleman, Dr. Pharrell. They even changed the order, they increased the order, but all of that you can hear in this 30 minute clip that we're going to go ahead and link inside the bio and also it should pop up on the screen right now as well. But it did not just happen to Dion. It happened to me over here and again, I explained how is it that you can look out for these type of scammers. Someone actually sent an email directly to me, right? Mr. Govcon grew himself, they sent me an email and it was the same thing. Now in this video, which is only about six minutes long, again, only 400 people watched it because why? We don't care. We're only interested in winning a contract and we think that we, this can't happen to us and it's not possible and so we're smarter than the average bear. The average person and so for us, you know, we're not concerned about watching videos. We only want to know about winning contracts, winning contracts, winning contracts. We don't want to know about the dark side of the industry and I can tell you that that FBI person that Dion spoke with that they gave me the number for that particular person from the FBI. I called him on the phone and he says that this happens to tens of thousands of you out there. So again, I know that you think that you're the smart one and that this could never happen to you, but this is happening to tens of thousands of small businesses out there. And so one of the things that I'd like to do in this particular episode is let's go over some of the reasons, not why it's happening, but how can we kind of spot this out from the standard person? So let's go back to this particular clip and in this clip, if you look at the screen, in fact, let me put it on full browser. One of the things that stands out to me that I talk about in this particular video is that it says small business specialists. Well, guess what? Small business specialists don't give out contracts. So small business specialists do not give out contracts. So if you see something that says small business specialists on it, that's a red flag. The other thing that we want to point out is when you hit the reply to all in the email, when you reply to the email address, look to see what is that the actual email address that it's going to. That's why it doesn't mean just because you see on the screen here, we'll go back and pull it back up. I'm sorry. Just because on the screen here, it says Hong song at Navy dot mill. When I hit reply all, what is it going to say on the screen at that time? That's what you're supposed to be looking for. And again, the other thing I just want people to remember it says no one is reaching out to you to give you contracts unsolicited unless you've done something to make them do so. And I can tell you this double check triple track quadruple check. My advice or what I told this person to do as the first and foremost, let's assume it's a scam. Right. We want to treat it just like it's a scam. It could be a real opportunity, but treat it like a scam. So be very, very cautious. Right. When you're very cautious, I want you to one is going back to what Dion said was it wasn't until after they received the order that she actually picked up the phone and called the contracting person that should have been the first thing she did, not the last thing she did. So again, if someone sent you an email, what Dion's mistake was, she actually was calling the number on the email address, right? Because that could be a spoof number. So yes, the email comes from this particular person, Jane Doe at U.S. Department of Agriculture. Wonderful. And again, we're only doing this to people that we've never reached out to before. So again, if you reached out to this agency or if you went to an industry event or if you put your name on some kind of list for that particular agency or callback, then you don't know this applies to you. But for those of you who did not do that, who did not register your name on the list, who did not attend an industry event, who did not do anything to, you did not create an SBA profile that was optimized, you did not add keywords. For those of you who did not do any of that stuff, I want you to treat the email as though it's spam. And so what we want to do is we want to go through some processes and some steps to ensure that it is in fact a legitimate opportunity for you. And so the first thing that I want you to do is like I said, you could do a reply all and make sure that that email address checks out. That's the first thing. Very easy. Without any difficulties and challenges, if you hit reply to the email and it sends it back to that same address, that's a good sign. Now the other thing that you want to make sure is that the actual address matches up. So let's look at the page. So you see where this says song.h.hong1 at navy.mil. One of the things that I did not mention is up here where it says the one after his name. That means that everything is probably right in the email address with the exception of that number one. So I would imagine that this gentleman's real email is song.h.hong at navy.mil excluding the one. Do you see that up here in the screen? So that's probably the red flag. So we want to make sure that in fact that this particular person's email that's on the screen is the correct email address. So yes, you may hit reply all and it matches up, but when you go to navy.mil and look up this gentleman's name, his email address does not have the number one in it. So that's number two. And then the third thing that you want to do is let's actually go to the agency's website to make sure that all this information checks out. So again, we want to go to the agency's website. We don't want to click on a link that they sent us because again, I create links all the time and my link could say godaddy.com link, but then it directs you to porn hub. So again, just because it says godaddy.com, it can redirect you to any type of non-solicited site. So it's not what you see here with your eyes. It's where it actually takes you. And that's my concern is a lot of folks are going to say, Oh, I clicked on the link in the email and it took me to this place. Well, again, I've seen spammers that have create spoof sites. So you want to go backwards and go through the actual website of the navy. If there's a Mr. Song hung in there and then find out what is the website address that corresponds to that particular person. These are very easy things that you can do that are not intrusive that will save you from experiencing the same fate that Dionne got. So again, I just want to kind of share this with folks out there because a lot of times, you know, when we get these messages from people, and again, I appreciate the comments and I appreciate the email, I just want remind folks to take a look. We've got some videos on this stuff. And I think sometimes because it is a 20, these are 2019 content. It's two years old. People think that this stuff is not happening. It's happening more now than ever before. I've personally been a phone with the FBI speaking to this. In addition to that, I've spoken to the contracting officer who was impacted by this and they have no idea that this is happening as well. So the government, a lot of times is aware, but they don't know it's so much of this occurring and happening that they don't know where it's coming from. Hope you enjoyed this video. Hope you liked the video. Make sure to share this with someone out there. Don't be a victim of fraud. Don't be a victim of being a scam. So again, just take your time. Be precautious out there. It's a journey. Okay. It's not a sprint. It's a marathon. And you don't have to get every opportunity. Everything is not necessarily for you. That's meant for you. So again, just be patient. Your time's going to come. Keep learning. Keep studying. I'm praying for all of you. I'm wishing you the best in your journey. Thank you so much for watching.