We have all heard of scams from time to time, right?

Well this one takes the cake. Several years ago I was looking for a printing trade show in China for a client of mine. Their needs were rather specific and I was having a hard time finding exactly what they wanted. It was getting late in the trade fair season and I was running out of options fast. I knew that if I did not find them a supplier in the next week I was going to lose the job. As I was on the internet looking for any factories that were centric to this type of printing I came across a trade show.

I thought this is ironic, here it is December, and I thought that all the trade shows for printing were over for the year and this one starts in two days. After browsing the website for 30 minutes I called my travel agent and booked a plane ticket and a hotel for this trade show. I thought this is great; here I am having a hard time finding a printer to do this job, and BOOM here are several factories that will be attending this show that can do it.

So I got home that night packed my bags and went to sleep early. Woke up at 5AM and went to the airport to catch my flight. I got into my hotel later that afternoon and then went around to see some of the local culture and get something to eat. The next morning I woke up early went out on the street caught a taxi to go to the trade pavilion. Upon arriving I saw big banners everywhere promoting companies that were attending the trade show. One thing struck me as a bit off though. None of the banners and balloons were for printing companies. They were all for Chinese cigarettes and Chinese alcohol (Baijiu). I immediately pacified myself and said nothing to worry about it is a big pavilion, I am sure there are multiple fairs happening this weekend. I then began to walk up to the doors of the pavilion to a very large crowd of people.

There were a lot of rather harsh comments flying around the crowd about “how could they” “what a disgrace” “how can this happen”. At that point I still did not know what was going on. I turned to an elderly man there and asked him what was going on. He says “I came to a fake trade show”. I then asked him what trade show, and sure enough it was the same one that I came to.

I know what you are thinking. This is so ridiculous that it could have not happened. Well I am here to say it did. A person setup a website in English and in Chinese (and I will add a good website) and collected down payments on booth space from thousands of companies and ran with the money. I still to the day do not know if anything ever happened to the person or group that did this. But I can only hope so.

My point of telling this embarrassing story is that many things in China are not always what they seem. I am a seasoned professional of China now and even I can get fooled. No matter what you do in China make sure that you verify everything.