 Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us this morning. I am Ryan Oakle with Global Marketing Manager with PMMI, and as a part of PMMI's Export Education series, we are delighted to have with us today Louise Kern with Global Business Information Services. She is going to delve into the very important topic of vetting your international business partners and customers. Louise has over 30 years of international experience beginning her work in the business information industry in 1996. Seeing the surging need for high quality business information in the increasingly global economy, Ms. Kern founded Global Business Information Services in 2003 to provide its clients with difficult to access business information such as China company investigations, market research, and databases. Responding to customers need to learn about foreign affiliates of Chinese companies by 2004. Globus was offering credit reports on any company, any size, anywhere in the world. Globus' products and services now include background investigations on companies and individuals globally, site visits, reference checking, highly customized market research, database lists of companies and individuals, import-export customs records, etc. Globus is an export promotion partner of the U.S. Commercial Service, a source for their international company profile reports on companies in China, Iraq, Austria, and elsewhere, and is a U.S. Export-Import Bank approved provider of credit reports. Ms. Kern has lived in mainland China, Austria, Germany, and France and speaks fluent Mandarin in German and is conversant in French. She has a bachelor's and master's degree from the University of Chicago and a graduate diploma from the prestigious Johns Hopkins School of Advance and International Studies on the Nanjing campus. Ms. Kern has served on the board of International Trade Association for Greater Chicago, International Women Associates of Chicago, the Chicago Sisters City of China Committee, and the U.S. Chapter of United Nations Development Fund for Women. That's a heck of a resume. But quickly before I turn this over to Louise, a few housekeeping items. This webinar is being recorded. The recording will be made available to all participants once the webinar is concluded. And for those who would like to ask questions of Ms. Kern, you'll notice a chat box down in the lower left portion of the window. There you will ask your question and send it to all presenters. We'll field the question and then ask it to Ms. Kern. You are muted, so that would be the only way to ask questions. All right, so enough of my talking. I will turn the webinar over to Ms. Kern. Ms. Kern. Thank you very much, Ryan. You want to let me know that you can hear me okay? I can hear you fine. Okay, terrific. Well, thanks for that introduction. It actually makes it my second slide completely worthless. But anyway, I know there are some folks on the line who I've communicated with before. I want to get this out there. If I use one of your reports as one of the anecdotes that I mentioned, you get 10% off of your next order, but you're going to have to remind me when you place the order. So just FYI, because I really like to illustrate with some actual case studies of things that we found interesting. So thanks for joining us. We'll just go to – you already know all this because Ryan told it to you. That's what we do. And what are you going to get out of this presentation? How to mitigate your risk in international business right from your own computer. There really are a lot of things that you can do. You shouldn't come to me and ask me your questions. I'm just saying there really are a lot of things that you can do to decide whether something is worth pursuing or not. How to recognize an email scam. How to identify a legitimate buyer, seller, agent, or distributor. And really to point out to you what should you try to know about them? Why do you need this? Well, because you don't want to waste your time on the stinkers. If you know you've got a winner, you can extend them credit and you can make that sale. Many of you are terrific U.S. companies who are doing business overseas. And maybe you have some European competitors. You probably are aware that European companies have a tendency to be able to grant credit maybe more easily than a U.S. company tends to be able to grant credit. Well, you know what that means. A European competitor in Europe and not European competitor is offering your client, what do I know, a year, two year, three year terms on purchase, but you are saying you want payment upfront or you want payment in 30 days, you might not get that sale because you can't offer them credit. But if you have enough information on that international buyer, then you can make an informed decision whether you can offer that credit because in many countries around the world, particularly in China and places like that, it's very hard for private companies to get a loan from the bank. So if you don't offer them credit, they may not be able to find credit elsewhere. So it could mean the difference between you making a sale and not, whether you are able to make that informed decision to say, hey, you know what, they look fabulous. Let's give them five year terms. If you picked the wrong agent, you could damage your prospects in the region for years. There are a lot of things to be concerned with about choosing an agent and really it cuts down to the fact that they are representing you in that country, but you want to make sure that you are always in control of that relationship and you always want to make sure you are in control of your identity in that foreign country. And it all boils down to taking steps early on can save you bundles of money and tons of grief down the road. It's really a lot more affordable to do prevention than it is to do the cleanup act if something goes wrong, really can make a huge difference. So next slide, recognizing scamming companies. What are some of these red flags that we've found through our years of experience? Well, Google the company's fax number. Why do I say fax number of the company? That's because in many countries around the world, the fax number is still going to tend to be a landline whereas the contact number that they gave you, you might not be able to recognize whether that is a cell phone or not. If it's a cell phone, folks can change their cell phone numbers very quickly and easily. A landline telephone number tends to be a little bit more difficult to change. So if an individual or a company has been engaged in scamming stuff, maybe they will change their mobile number quickly, but the fax number that they give you would tend to go from one scamming company to the next. So that's why I'm suggesting to Google the fax number. You can Google the company name and the contact person's name and the word scam or the word fraud or the word cheat. If anything comes up, wake up and smell the coffee. If somebody spent the time to write something about that company being a cheating company, it's probably going to be a pretty strong indication that that is a bad news company. So you want to pay attention to that. If there are 27 hits saying Mr. Wong at Fujian Steel is a fraud, you should listen to those 27 steps and say, okay, you know what, I'm going to spend my time researching a company which has more potential. You can go to a website called ripoffreport.com and see if there's anything on there. That's a pretty neat site where folks have input their terrible experience that they had with the company and with enough details for you to understand who's the company, who were the contact people, what were the contact details, sort of a dollar range of what was in question and some more details to help you understand the situation. One of my favorite things to do is to do a who is search of the website. The who is search, for those of you who are not familiar with it, is the registration details of the company's website. So one of the sites that I like to use to find that information is called domaintools.com. And for free, you just click on, you go to domaintools.com. They have a click on the upper right hand side that says who is. You click on that and you put the website address of the company you are looking at. You know, glo-bis.com and you see when was it registered, whose name was it used to register, what address, what were the contact details. So generally a company website was established around the same time that the company was established. And I do understand that we didn't have the Internet also many years ago, but if you see a company is telling you that they were set up in 2002 but their website was set up two months ago, then generally it's a sign that the company was not actually set up in 2002. One of the things to watch for with the who is information is that quite a few companies are using a privacy control on the who is information so that you can't actually see who did register that website in the first place. So there are a couple ways, well, one way to get around that is to Google the website of the company and the word who is and see if you can find a cached version, a historical image of the original registration details of that company. So this is all free for you to do. So that's one way to do it. And the second thing to note about the privacy, if you do see a privacy on the who is information of a company is that we do consider that to be a marker. It's a red flag. It doesn't mean necessarily that the company is a scamming company. It just means that it's one of the things that we consider that if we see that there's a privacy on the website and especially if the website has been established less than one year ago then we consider to be a fairly strong red flag and we want to look at some more factors about the company to determine whether it might be a scam or not. How about that email that you got? Is it personalized to you and your industry or is it nice? I get these all the time. Greetings. I admired your list of products on your website and I would like more details. So that's too bland. If it's personalized to you specifically your name, your industry, some details about that, that's a good sign that it really was intended to you and it's not a phishing email. Does it sound too good to be true? That email that you have in your inbox, promising they want to buy 500,000 units of your really awesome US-made product and they want to pay a full price and they want to pay you 50% upfront and they're not haggling with the price at all. Just always get a reality check. Ask your dog, ask your cubicle maid, ask whoever. Ask somebody else just to make sure that you don't have dollar signs in your eyes and you've stopped seeing reality. If something sounds too good to be true, it often is. So warning signs of a Chinese email scam. We put this together a few years ago because the Department of Commerce who we work with closely asked us, oh gosh, Louise, we're seeing so many US companies are getting these email solicitation letters and most of them are turning out to be scams. Can we put something together to help our clients recognize a situation that's possibly they should not pursue? So these are the warning signs just right down the list. They contacted you off the web, you got an email from them. They have import, export or trade in their name. So not every Chinese company that has import, export or trade in their name is a scammer. It's just that many, many, many of the ones we have uncovered are scammers. So there are also quite a few lately chemical companies and things like that who are scammers. So they want to conduct a very large volume of trade. They insist your senior, large volumes of trade are not bad, it's just that they're really trying to entice you. They insist your senior executive travel to China immediately to sign the contract with them in person. You don't need to sign contracts in person in China. They request money prior to the trip to pay for a reception in your honor and or once they're in China, they request money or goods to grease the wheels with local officials, FCPA, anyone. You are not allowed to bribe officials anywhere in the world. And actually, you know, what Chinese companies aren't allowed to bribe officials. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm not saying it doesn't happen in China. I'm not saying it doesn't happen in the United States. I'm just saying you're not allowed to do it. So bad sign if they want to do that. And I have to tell you this, this bullet point is really, I mean, there are some nasty stories that are associated with this of clients we've warned and they've come back and they said, all right, so they had a party, they had a big banquet for me, but then they gave me the bill and it was, you know, like $5,000. And I felt like I had to pay it and things like that. Well, you can still get a very nice meal in China. You can get a very nice meal in China for $5,000, but not the places that these folks were going and things like that. So there are a lot of really doozies with the scams that they try to get folks to pay, even $2,000, $5,000. That's a lot of money for a lot of Chinese folks. So if the company has been in business for less than a year, it's a red flag. Of course, not every company that is less than one year old is a scamming company. It's just one of the red flags, like when we see the privacy on there who is information for their website registration, it's just one of the red flags. If we see a company that's less than a year old, then we want to start looking at other things that give us a better impression of whether they are a scammer or not. If the company can provide no verifiable references. And for references, this is another thing which pulls up the value of having a landline telephone number as your contact rather than the mobile number. So if a company provides you the contact details of the references, you might not be able to recognize whether that contact telephone number they gave you for the reference is a cell phone or a landline number. If it's a cell phone, why is that bad? Well, because it could be his cousin pretending to be the purchasing manager at some big famous company, but he's actually just some, you know, whatever, unemployed slash scamming participant who is trying to help his cousin out. So what you want to do is have a phone number that is the switchboard of the company that you are trying to get the reference from, and you want to have that extension number to call through to that person from the main switchboard so that can help you understand that person really does work for that company and you can confirm through that also the position of the individual. So also taking a look at the email extension, if people are giving you email references, if it's a free email extension like a Gmail or a Hotmail, something like that, rather than joseplumbing.com, that also should give you some concern because if it's a free email address like a Gmail, then it's more difficult for you to associate that email address with a real company. So next one, what can you do? Well, there really are a lot of things that you can do. Google the company name, the contact person's name, and scam or fraud or cheat. I mean it. I said it before. This is the last time I'm going to say it in this presentation. But it can be really helpful. And what do you do if something comes up? Do you go and spend three more hours trying to find out whether they are a scam or fraud or a cheat? No, you chuck that one to the side and you concentrate on the other ones who don't look as nasty. Google the word business registration and the country or the state if you're looking at a U.S. company you might find free or very inexpensive official company registration information when you search under a company name. There are quite a few countries where the company, the official company registration authority has that information available on their website. So make sure that you're on an official website and I mean like not a trade organization or maybe a business which gets money from putting company information up there. It's not that that information is incorrect. It's just that we tend to value the accuracy of the government sourced information more highly. So for a lot of the European countries you're going to be able to find their core registration information like their legal name, their registration number, their date of registration, things like that available for free from a legitimate source. Do a who is search of their website. I know I said that before and maybe this is the last time it's in the presentation but it's really, really helpful. And make sure that you have the most current information as possible on a company. In tough economic times with low margins we saw in 2008 when the crash hit in the fall we were doing investigations on Chinese companies that had literally closed their doors two weeks prior. I mean literally like they put a padlock on the door and that was it. Nobody was going in and nobody was going out. We have a great client in Russia who used to just order the business registration information on a company which is literally what's the official record on this company? What's their legal name? What their legally registered address? Who owns some things like that? But shortly before this one case I'm going to tell you about she decided oh I'm going to go for the more involved report, the business credit report which gives more detail. It gives the financials. It gives the litigation record. It's more involved in investigation of the company. She had to check out a chemical company in northeast China. Well our researchers had some difficulty getting through to the company so they called the Communist Party Chief in that town and he told our researchers why they couldn't get in touch with that company because it blew up like a month prior because of a very terrible chemical explosion blew up not only the factory but half the town. People died in it and the Communist Party rep said he didn't even know whether the company was going to open again. So that company was still sending out communications as if they existed and luckily our client in Russia knew from us no this company doesn't exist anymore so don't make any down payments because they're not going to be able to fulfill that order. So you really need to make sure that the information that you have on a company is really accurate now. It's not two months old. It's not two years old. You really want to make sure that the information is accurate on that company now. So what gives you an indication that if a company is legitimate? Do they have any social media coverage? LinkedIn, things like that. If you Google their name and the only thing that comes up about them is their listing of selling a product on alibaba.com that's not a good sign. You want to be dealing with companies that people are talking about saying, hey, that's a great company or there was a newspaper article in a positive light about them or something like that. Let me jump back to the LinkedIn thing. Just because somebody has 500 links in contacts that doesn't mean they're legitimate. We were checking out a company in California for one of our clients in Canada. The gentleman in question, the supposed owner of the company has over 500 LinkedIn connections and things like that. He also has LinkedIn recommendations but when you actually look at the recommendations it's actually not folks recommending him. It's him recommending other people. So you have to pay attention to that to actually look at the details of the LinkedIn site. And just to cut the long story short this gentleman, big time fraud but he did have a lot of LinkedIn connections. So just because someone has a lot of LinkedIn connections or a lot of internet traffic doesn't mean they are legitimate. It's just that if you Google a company name or an individual and you see nothing about them it's the nothingness that concerns us. The lack of internet traffic about an individual or a company is concerning. It's a red flag. So be sure to Google them in the local language too. See if any job listings come up and read the descriptions. Do they concern the industry or are they just looking for English language customer service? This is one which we have used as an indicator of red flags. If a Chinese company for example is just looking for English language customer service rest but they are supposed to be some manufacturer of some high tech medical device and things like that but they have never had any job listings having to do with anything besides an English language customer service rest. It gives us the impression that they are just looking for more staff to be able to communicate with potential scant clients to scam. So you can do that and if you are not using TranslateGoogle.com to understand things in a foreign language then you should be and sometimes it's funny what they write but at least you can get a gist of what the content is in a language that you don't perhaps already speak. So what information should you be asking your international business partners to provide you? At a minimum you want their full company name. You want their name in the local language. Why do you want their name in the local language? This is very important because companies will register with their local company authorities in their local language. In China they register in Chinese. In Japan they register in Japan. So the legal name of the entity is the local version, the local language version, the Chinese version, the Japanese version, whatever. It's just as a sidebar for a Chinese company if they are engaged in the Internet, if they have an import-export license then they will also have an official English language name. The official English language name will not necessarily be identical to the English language name that they are using with you. That doesn't mean it's a scam or a fraud or something like that. It just means that when they got their import-export license maybe they didn't have the English name that they wanted to use yet. So the Chinese authorities just made a literal translation of their name from the Chinese into English. And maybe that's not the one that the company ended up using for future use with its clients and things like that. So the English language name that they give you is not necessarily the official version of their name but the local language name like the Chinese character name or the Japanese character name, that is the official name of the company. You want to ask them for their registration number. The registration number is as unique at the local language name. There will only be one company in that country with that local language name and there will also only be one company in that country with that business registration number. So it's unique, it's an identifier. Their address, that's what you want to ask. Lots of folks, I'm sorry, I'm laughing, it's really weird of me to laugh. But seriously, there are so many companies out there who are doing business with companies and they don't know their full legal name, they don't know their address and they don't know the contact numbers. It's not a laughing matter if any of you are involved in like exporting dual use goods and things like that, you may be familiar with blue lantern cases and blue lantern cases when the US government has determined that you sold something you weren't supposed to sell to to somebody you weren't supposed to sell it to. And the number one root cause of those bad cases is that the US company did not know who their business partner really was. They didn't know the name, they didn't know the address, they didn't know the contact numbers, things like that. So it's not a laughing matter, it's very serious because your fines can be really significant on that. So you really want to be able to have this information on every company in the world also. In New Jersey, you're doing business with and if they give you a copy of their registration information, don't take that to mean like, oh yeah, okay great. I'm solidly know who this company is. I have their registration details so that means that they're a legitimate company. No, I've seen lots of forged registration documents where they use the pink program to cut in somebody else's information or cut in their information onto somebody else's registration document and things like that. Take that information, the copy that they gave you, the PDF or scan whatever of their registration information that they provided you and give that to the company who you have due the due diligence on the company, have them confirm or deny that the information they provided you was accurate. And also one of the things that you want to look at on the registration details is when were they established. The magic number is one year. If it's less than one year ago, again remember that that's going to be a red flag. Not every company that's less than one year old is a scam, but 99% of the scamming companies we've uncovered have been around for less than one year. Usually they can't last longer than that then they close shop and they open with a different name or something like that. So if the company is less than a year old, big warning sign. So how can you obtain reliable background information on foreign customers and suppliers? Check them out. Always order a report on the company. Freshly investigated is best because you want to make sure you're not dealing with old information because you could get in a trap, maybe they blew up recently. Hey, the US Commercial Service, ICP report, you can order from them. That's getting the US Commercial Service on board to help you succeed with that export that you're trying to make. So they have the ICP stands for the International Company Profile. You can order them from us. And what are you going to find in a standard credit report? Their registration details, their ownership, what type of company is so you'll learn are they a manufacturer or are they a trader? Why is that important to know? Because if they're a trader but you think that they're manufacturing something for you, that means that there's another party involved. Another party is taking a cut, which could be a good or a bad. Having another party involved could be a good thing because maybe the actual factory doesn't speak English or for whatever reason, sometimes it's really good to have a go-between person. But if they have presented themselves as a manufacturer but they're actually a trader, that's a negative sign because they weren't being forthcoming with their real situation. The litigation record. If they sued for IP violation, that would be a bad sign for you if you are potentially going to have some kind of interaction with them that could expose your IP. Don't want to maybe be working with a company who stole three other companies' IPs. Their last three years' financials, there should be an asterisk after that because in some countries, the financials on private companies are not required to be disclosed. That means that the company is not required to reveal them in a somewhat public fashion. So private companies in China, for the most part, are required to disclose their financials so generally we can get them, we can't always get them. There are regional differences. But a private company in Hong Kong is not required to file its financials. So in very rare cases, you will see the financials on a private company in Hong Kong. So just be aware of that. If the financials are something that you really want to see and maybe you wouldn't order the credit report if you weren't going to get the financials, then ask your due diligence provider to tell you before you commit to the order, hey, am I going to get those financials on that Chinese company or not? And they'll be able to hopefully tell you what the disclosure levels are in the region. Trademarks and patents, you should also be able to see that in a standard report. You want to see, that's another indication of legitimacy if they've registered their trademark. Hey, did they register your trademark? That would be helpful to know, especially if that's the distributor who you're planning on working with. You know what, if they register your trademark in that country, who do you think owns that trademark? Do you think you own it or do you think they own it? They own it, that's not good. So you can have them help you register your trademark, but you ensure that you are listed as the owner of that trademark in that country. And patents are a great sign of legitimacy if a company has some patents under their belt and that really does mean that they're engaged in R&D. So what else is there here? Make sure that these companies are reviewed by unbiased third parties and it's not just somebody saying, oh, I recommend this company. Yes, it's my cousin's company. So just make sure that the reviews that you're hearing about companies are unbiased. Decide whether you want the company to know whether they're being investigated. Because in some countries, you might give them the impression that you don't trust them if you tell them that you're checking them out. And for example, in the Middle East, there may be a little bit uncomfortable. They want you to trust them. Well, everybody wants you to trust them, but they may not understand why you feel like you have to have somebody else tell them they're a great business partner because you should just believe them. So blame somebody else. Say, because actually this could be true. I'm not telling you to lie. I'm just saying you use a plausible reason because this actually should be a reason that this is your company policy because it should be your company policy to have this kind of investigation done on all your partners worldwide. Hey, if you have a legal team that you deal with, blame them. Blame the lawyer. They end up money for it. They can handle it. Say your legal team requires third-party investigations. Let the company you're looking at know you require this from all your prospective partners worldwide. You're not picking on them because of where they're from or because you feel uneasy about them, that this is your policy and because it should be. And you do this on all companies worldwide. So how do you know you can trust them? You never know whether you can trust them. Even if they were great for somebody else, doesn't mean they're going to be great for you. It's the level of relationship that you have with each company and contact in the company, which is the most important determinant as to whether they're going to be a good business partner for you. So just because they paid someone else on time doesn't mean they're even going to pay you at all. And in China, a contract is not culturally perceived as binding. It is your personal relationship with the company, which will keep you out of court. And this is really something to think across the board for all countries that you want to really be sure that you're building that rapport with them and building your relationship because that's going to be the deciding factor of whether you have a positive business. Well, also, I mean, if they're not a scamming company, whether things will turn out is your personal relationship with them that can really be gold to you want to stay out of court. You don't even ever want to get there and your relationship will keep you there, keep in a good place. So what other tips might help you? So register your own website and trademark in every country. Do not leave it up to your agent. Otherwise, you might find that they owned your brand, they're not you. And your website, I mean, it is very important to do that. You may have to use a proxy in some countries because some countries require local address to have the website. But truly, you should do this. There are cases that, for example, if people are familiar with the Chicago company Groupon, well Groupon.cn, the China company website extension, when it started out Groupon.cn was not actually Groupon Chicago. And it was very, there was a lot of money and a lot of legal action involved for Groupon to get control over that website in China. It was a long-term case. The original register in a Groupon.cn used the same color, logo, the same image, exactly the same type of Groupon deals were on there. So folks going to the Groupon.cn site thought that they were on the real Groupon China site, but they weren't. So this is going back to what I said at the beginning, an ounce of prevention. It doesn't cost too much money to register that website in the first place or to register your trademark in the first place, but to buy it back, that can be very expensive or impossible. So really consider that. And also consider that if you have a really terrific product, somebody's probably going to want to pretend to be you or to pretend to be that product. So even if you're not in a country, maybe your fake product is, but if you have already registered your trademark there and have already set up a website there, you have a lot more legal protection at trying to get those people who are pretending to be you to stop. You always want to separately confirm any registration documentation that you've received from the company in question. Again, if they send you a PDF or a scam, then you send it right on to your provider of due diligence and you say, please confirm that this information is accurate. If the company has changed its name, run a litigation search on the old name too. We have seen this happening increasingly on Chinese companies. If we see that suddenly a Chinese company has changed its name and it's not due to the fact that they changed their company type from like an LTD to a limited shares company, whatever. When we run a litigation check on the original name of the company, oftentimes we see corruption lawsuit or whatever, a lawsuit that was involved. You can find it by just googling the old Chinese name of the company. It's easy to find. The owners of the company were aware of this. They said, jeez, we don't want people googling our name and having this bad stuff come up. So what can we do? Well, let's change our name. When you see that a company has changed its name, make sure that you do a litigation search on the previous name as well. And if there are multiple names, because quite a few companies have changed their name several times, do it on all the names just to ensure that they're not trying to hide something from you. If the registered address of the company does not match the operating address, find out why. Now this is important because we've seen a big increase in companies pretending to be legitimate companies. So you meet them, they have a business card, and they have a certain address on the business card. But when you look at the registration details of the company, the address is completely different. And the reason that the address is different in some of these cases is because the person who contacted you is just pretending to be there, to be at the real company. So if you see a discrepancy between the operating address and the address that they've provided you, find out why. And you'll be able to find that out in the due diligence report that you conduct on the company. And make sure that the person you're dealing with truly works for that company. This is also going back to the free email account, Gmail, Hotmail. Are they using a Gmail or Hotmail? And just because they're using a Gmail or Hotmail account does not mean that they are a scammer. It just means we feel more comfortable if we're seeing, at glo-bis.com, that's something that you're really tying it to that company. So again, I want to stress that just because somebody's using a Gmail or a Hotmail account doesn't mean that they're not legitimate. You just want to know, well, why aren't they using a company account? Why aren't they using a company account? So conclusions. If you've already spent more than a few hours researching a company yourself, you would have saved money by purchasing a report on them. And you would also be confident that the info is unbiased and hopefully accurate. It's a lot more expensive to fix a problem partner than to find the right partner in the first place. And knowing how much credit you can grant a buyer might mean you make that sale instead of your competition. So that is that. I think I'm like one minute ahead of schedule. That's pretty awesome. Anybody got any questions? Sure. Yeah, we have time for questions. If you want to ask a question of Louise, just enter it in the lower left-hand portion of the screen. And that'll pop up on my end, and I'll be sure to ask it for everyone to hear. I have a question for you, Louise. You mentioned Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. That's on the minds of a lot of CFOs in the U.S. and how they protect their companies doing business overseas. It's becoming harder and harder to be compliant with FCPA. What are some of the things that companies should do to compile information on their business partners to be compliant with FCPA to protect themselves from being prosecuted under FCPA? Should you be asking for your business partners to fill out a questionnaire? What's some of the information you could use there? Yeah, actually, I think it's like five standard questions that we ask when our client asks us, I really want you to cover the FCPA things. And they're really standard questions. Is your company aware of FCPA? Is your company aware that this applies to you as having a relationship with a U.S. company? Do you have any procedures in place? What are your spend limits? Please don't quote me on this. I know you're recording it because if it's not in front of me and I didn't know you were going to ask me this, I'm not going to pull it up on my screen, but it's really standard. You want to know, do they have this? It's not a bad thing if they don't have one in place, but you want to know if they don't have one in place. If they don't have one in place, great. Tabula Rasa. You show them the important FCPA video every year. You have them sign that they saw it and hopefully they're paying attention to it because folks around the world, maybe in countries around the world, maybe have a different impression of what corruption is and sort of how much can you give and what's the spend limit and things like that. As a matter of fact, I think that paying for sexual favors in China was not considered a corrupt practice until like six or seven years ago. There are different levels. You want to have a standard set of questions that you're asking. Do you have the FCPA blog? If anyone wants specific questions, give me a break and just email louisaclogues.com and I'll send you the list because my memory is so awful. Sure. No problem. I've got a few questions coming in about the ICP reports, the International Company profile reports that you provide with the Department of Commerce. How much do the reports cost? How long does it take to get? What type of information is on them and how often would you advise refreshing the report? Okay. So the U.S. Department of Commerce offers the ICP report, the International Company profile report in most countries around the world. They don't have offices everywhere. Globis actually doesn't do them for all of their offices. We'd love to, but we're doing them for China since 2004, Iraq since 2011. We do some other countries as well that you mentioned at the beginning, Ryan. So for a small to medium-sized U.S. company, the U.S. Department of Commerce charges $600 for the ICP, and for a large company, the U.S. Department of Commerce charges $900. Their turnaround time is 21 days. So you're going to get all of the stuff that I mentioned. Let me go back in the slides. For the standard credit report, so you're going to get all of these things, the registration details, the ownership, what type of company, the litigation record, the last three years financials, and then if they are disclosed in that country, references, a recommended credit limit, trademarks and patents and things like that. So Indonesia, for example, we do those for the Department of Commerce as well. In Indonesia, in many of the countries, the Department of Commerce will include a site visit with an interview, not in all of them, but in many of them. So for Indonesia, the Department of Commerce staff members physically visit the company and they ask a series of standard questions about the background of the executives of the company, their training and things like that. There are sample reports. If you Google, if you go on to the export.gov website and do in the search thing, if you put an ICP report, you'll find the information on that and you'll also find out which countries they do that and you will order them through your local Department of Commerce office. So, Glovis, we do ICP reports and ICP type reports also for clients, not just the Department of Commerce, but other clients and depending on whether you need the site visit or not, the travel to the location has to be paid for by the client and things like that. So it can change the price and if you're interested in a specific country and you would be interested in ordering from Glovis and not from the Department of Commerce, I really think you should first, if you're planning on selling that product overseas, if this is an export, it is in your best interest to work together with the U.S. Department of Commerce because you, by ordering the report through them or using one of their gold key services and things like that, you're getting their entire staff on your team. They will literally get a gold star if you make that sale, if you make that export, they will hold your hand and do their best with their whole office there to try to help you succeed over there. So we're just giving you the information. There you have the whole team of their trained staff members holding your hand to help you succeed. So if at all possible, you should order it through them. It's like the Visa card commercial, you know, priceless, or AMEX, I'm sorry, I can't remember which one it is, but really you get a lot of added value from ordering from the Department of Commerce. But we, you know, if you need to come directly to us, we'll help you too. I'm not underselling myself, I'm just stating the facts. Great, great, great. Another quick question on how to just verify that the companies are actually legitimate with some of the tools that are available out there. ISO, registration, certifications, if the company files for say an ISO 9000, would you be able to access that information online? Is that public record? Should you believe a company, for example, if they are on Alibaba and they have a gold membership on Alibaba, what type of vetting does Alibaba really do with that company to give them that gold membership status? And also in the business licenses or business registration, each company is supposed to, at least in China, list their legal representative. Is that another route that you can take to Google the legal representative and maybe contact them to see if they're legit? These are awesome questions. I have a really informed audience. All right, well, I'm going to go backwards. So let's start with the legal rep in the Chinese company. Absolutely. You want to look at who the legal rep of the legal representative of the company is. For those of you who are not familiar with what does that mean? That's the principle of the company. That is the legal entity that if something hits the fan, then that is the person who the Chinese government or whomever is going to go after to say you did something wrong. They are the individual who is representing the company legally. So you want to Google that person's name, but in China, how many people are there? 1.3 billion? Has anybody heard of Laobai Xing? It means the old 100 names. There are basically 100 family names in China, surnames in China. That's why everybody you meet is called huang or wang or me, whatever. Because there are basically only 100 last names you're using, and then they'll either have one more character or generally either one or two characters to represent their familiar name. But maybe there are going to be 200,000 people in China who actually share those characters of the name. If you Google the name of an individual in China, and you see a lot of hits, make sure that that's actually the person who you were looking at, because their name is not going to be unique. It's not like a Chinese company name is going to be unique, but an individual's name is not going to be unique because there are so many Chinese people using one of 100 last names basically, and then only one or two other characters generally. So you're going to get so many people with the same name that just make sure that you've caught the right person when you're Googling them, but each individual is going to have a PRC ID number, and that is going to be unique. It's like there's also a security number, so that's a unique number. So what you can do with the legal reps, full Chinese character name, and their PRC ID number is you can do a search to see in what other companies in China does that individual have a role as a shareholder, a legal rep, an executive, a manager, whatever, and that way you can find out about any possible related companies that they didn't tell you about. For example, if they have a secret OEM manufacturing facility down the road from the one that you're using with your SuperDuper IP, it's helpful for you to know that there's another very similar company down the road with the same ownership and things like that. So definitely you should look into the legal rep because that's the most important person in the company. It's just a really, really fast one. If the legal rep is not a shareholder in the company, that's a red flag because the legal rep is really supposed to be the most important person in the company. So be mindful if the legal rep is not a shareholder. And if the company is owned by another company, perhaps the legal rep is the owner of the other company kind of a thing. So just make sure that if you see the legal rep but you see that this company is owned by a company, don't just say automatically say, oh, well then the legal rep is not a shareholder. No, you have to look at who owns the shareholder company of the company you're looking at. And then Alibaba and the Gold Seal. Please, please, please be careful with Alibaba. I think 57 of their top executives landed in jail six years ago, whatever, because they were selling those seals of verified Alibaba seller and stuff like that. You still have a lot of Alibaba companies which are scamming companies. So that goes back to one of my slides where I said, you know, if the only internet traffic about them is they're listing on Alibaba, German Alibaba, Chinese Alibaba or whatever. If they're only on Alibaba, they don't see any other traffic about them, that is a warning sign to us that they are not a real company. They may be a legally registered company, but again, 99% of the Chinese scamming companies we found were legally registered less than one year ago, but they're on Alibaba, they're registered there, they're paying a fee to be listed there, and they have not necessarily actually been verified. ISO. Yeah, actually, our standard credit reports will include the ISO certification information. If you're interested in that information, just make sure that you are telling your due diligence provider to check that information for you when they conduct the research, and I think the specific question was, are there any online sites where you can check that? I don't have anyone that I trust, and the reason for this is that it's that added to get what you paid for, that if it's a lot of information that you can access for free, you have to be cautious about whether that information is valid or not. I mean, just frankly, from our position, we don't access free ISO information, we always pay for it. Okay, great. To get the business license or registration in China, at least you have to contact, is it the administration for industry and commerce? Is that the state level or the provincial level government body that you would contact for that? Yeah, so the AIC is the federal Chinese government body, and the Chinese company will actually register with the SAIC, their local AIC office, and then the local office sends the information to the main office, the AIC. So there are the local offices, most of them or all of them, I have a list have websites where you can access the information. The sites are only in Chinese, and they have those identity, protectors where you actually have to type in that weird Q is back, not Q is back, but what am I typing here, Q5, and to show that you're a human and not a machine? I can't remember what it's called, help me out here. But for these Chinese registration websites, you have to do most of it with Chinese characters. So if you don't speak Chinese and you can't recognize, well, what is that character? You can't actually conduct the search. And the main website, the main AIC website, is not as accurate as the local websites. So you should just be cautious that if you can't find the company you're looking for on there, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're not registered. And if you're looking at the local sites, try to have somebody who speaks Chinese do the search for you because otherwise you may not actually be able to conduct the search because you won't get through those hoops trying to prove that you're not a machine. Okay, one last question here. This one might pertain a little bit more on the trade finance side, but maybe you can tackle it too. The question is if one enters into a letter of credit with the foreign company for a product where payment is made in full after shipment and they choose to cancel when you already have much invested in it, how can the supplier be protected or make hole for the money invested in the product? Wow. Letters of credit, I have to say I'm not an expert on them. I just know that it's actually quite, it's quite, I don't want to say easy, it's quite possible for folks to get out of the letter of credit. One of the main ones that we hear about that's relevant to us as a due diligence provider is that one of the frequent claims is that if you don't have the true legal name of the Chinese entity on the letter of credit, I mean like a discrepancy is like you don't have the period in the right place or you don't have a comma after you know co-co-dot-comma-ltd-dot or whatever that they will call it if the dot is missing, the period is missing, then they'll call it a discrepancy and they won't honor the letter of credit. So letters of credit are really a touchy thing and definitely not an expert on it. You need to make sure that your bank that you're dealing with truly does understand letters of credit and all the cautionary tales about them because there really are quite a few ways of getting around them. Okay, great. Any last questions? I think we're just about at our end time here at noon. I don't have anything else coming through. Louise, thank you very much for a very insightful presentation. Again, I encourage everybody on the call to contact Louise directly to get some more information on how to best vet their business partners and customers. Not just in China, I know we touched on China a lot today but all around the world, Louise is a great help in that regard. Just to let you know as well, we will have another webinar on May 19th and this one would be great to answer your letter of credit questions. This one's on trade finance tools for closing international business. We have Jenny Norris with the Meridian Finance Group who will share some insight on the trade finance tools available to exporters to ensure you get paid on time and protect yourself as well. So please be sure to join us for that. Again, thank you to Louise and thank you to all of our participants on the call. I look forward to having you all back on the call on May 19th. Thank you very much, everyone. Have a good day. Thanks for listening, everyone. Take care. Bye-bye.