Caveat-vendor: beware of Chinese scamsters

Put yourselves in the shoes of a producer with plenty of wine to sell. You receive an email or letter from a Chinese "Buying Center" interested in placing a test order worth $250,000 or more for one of its clients . There is no haggling over price, and an undertaking to wire payment for the wine before it leaves your winery. To make the deal, you are invited (at your own cost) to visit Guilin where the buyers are based. Once there, you are welcomed and entertained lavishly and taken on city tours. Next, comes a visit to an art gallery, where it is explained that you should honour local tradition by buying a gift for the head of the company that is actually purchasing your wine. You will carry the artwork home with you to hand over to the buyer when he visits your winery and signs the final contract. The art on show is fairly pricy, and you are warned off spending too much. Nothing more than $25-30,000. You make the purchase and head home with it, full of happy memories and pleasure at the thought of the Chinese money that is about to flow in your direction. But that, unfortunately is the end of the story. The buyer never actually appears at your door and efforts to contact him or the Buying Center are fruitless. You are left with your wine, an almot certainly heavily overpriced painting and credit card bills for an expensive trip to China.
I was told about this scam by one of its victims, Graeme Avery, owner of Sileni one of the biggest wineries in Hawkes Bay, New Zealand. Avery, a pharmaceutical scientist and former owner of medical publishing company, is no-one's idea of a sucker, but he says that he was completely taken in by the sophistication of the fraud. As, it seems, were at least two other New Zealand wineries, and almost certainly many elsewhere, as well as manufacturers of every other kind of product. Type "guilin scam" into Google and you'll find nearly 300 sites. Apparently, Guilin has developed a Lagos-like reputation for this kind of behaviour, thanks allegedly to the involvement of local authorities, but I'd be surprised if similar fraudsters were not at work elsewhere in China, not to mention other developing countries.
You have been warned...