By Aditya Shinde, Founder, Semperworks
A buyer in Surat once transferred ₹14 lakh to a supplier he found on a B2B platform. The company had a professional website, a listed phone number, and a catalogue that looked convincing. The money landed in an account. The supplier stopped picking up. The website disappeared three days later. This wasn't a fringe case — it's a pattern we see repeatedly across Indian trade.
If you're about to send an advance payment to a new supplier, this post walks you through exactly what to check and how to check it, before a single rupee moves.
Why supplier fraud is so easy to pull off in India
India's B2B trade infrastructure is fragmented. You have suppliers listed across IndiaMART, TradeIndia, Alibaba, JustDial, and dozens of niche portals — and a listing on any of these platforms tells you almost nothing about whether the business is legitimate. Anyone can pay a few hundred rupees, upload a logo, and have a live supplier profile within 48 hours. The platforms aren't running GSTIN validation. They're not cross-referencing IEC numbers. They're certainly not monitoring news for fraud alerts.
The other problem is that Indian buyers — especially SME importers and procurement managers — tend to rely on trust signals that are easy to fake. A polished website, a WhatsApp profile picture of a warehouse, a PDF catalogue with your logo already on it. These take an afternoon to produce.
Legitimate suppliers, on the other hand, leave a trail. That trail is verifiable, if you know where to look and you actually look before sending money.
The six checks that matter
1. IEC (Import Export Code) verification
If a supplier is claiming to export goods, they must have a valid IEC issued by the DGFT. This is non-negotiable — no IEC means no legal export activity. The DGFT has a public portal where you can enter an IEC number and confirm it's active, confirm the entity name, and see the address on record.
Ask your supplier for their IEC before anything else. If they hesitate or give you a number that doesn't pull up a result, that's your answer.
2. GSTIN verification
Every legitimate registered business in India has a GSTIN. You can verify it on the GST portal — it shows the legal name, the state, the registration status, and whether the business is currently active or has been cancelled. A cancelled or suspended GSTIN is a serious flag. A GSTIN that doesn't match the entity name the supplier is using is an even bigger flag.
Some traders operate under a trade name that differs from their legal entity name. That's fine — just confirm the legal name on the GSTIN matches what's on the pro forma invoice and any agreements you're signing.
3. Business address cross-check
A registered address on the GSTIN or IEC is a starting point, not a confirmation. The next step is checking whether the business actually appears at that address in the real world. Google Maps and Google Places will often show you reviews, photos, and operating details if a business has a physical presence. A company that has a registered address in an industrial area in Pune but shows up on Maps as a residential apartment in a completely different city has something to explain.
This check takes about five minutes and catches a surprising number of mismatches.
4. News and fraud scan
Search the supplier's company name, their proprietor's name if you have it, and their phone number across Google News and general search. Add terms like "fraud," "cheating case," "FIR," and "scam" to the query. You won't catch everything this way, but you'll catch cases where other buyers have already reported the same entity.
This matters more than most buyers realise. Fraud operators often get reported, sometimes in local newspapers, sometimes in forums or WhatsApp trade groups, sometimes in formal legal filings. The trail is public. Most buyers never search for it.
5. B2B platform presence check
Being listed on IndiaMART or TradeIndia is not a trust signal by itself. But it can be useful context. If a supplier claims to be a large manufacturer with 20 years of export experience, and there's zero presence on any B2B platform, no LinkedIn page, and no discernible digital footprint — that gap is worth asking about. Conversely, if you find a supplier listed across multiple platforms with consistent details, that's modest corroboration.
What you're looking for here is consistency, not volume. Do the name, address, and products match across platforms?
6. SSL and website legitimacy
This one matters more for online-first suppliers or anyone who wants you to log in to a portal to place your order. Check whether the website has a valid SSL certificate. Check when the domain was registered — a domain registered two months ago for a company claiming 15 years of export history is an obvious inconsistency. A missing SSL on a site asking for your banking details is a basic red flag that still gets overlooked.
A real pattern we've seen
Let me give you a concrete example of how these checks interact.
A procurement manager at a mid-sized manufacturing firm in Nagpur was sourcing a specialty chemical from a new supplier. The supplier had a professional website, a listing on TradeIndia, and a responsive sales rep on WhatsApp. The pro forma invoice looked correct.
When the procurement manager ran an IEC check, the code came back valid — but the entity name on the DGFT record was different from the company name on the invoice. When he checked the GSTIN, the registration had been cancelled six months earlier. When he ran a news search combining the proprietor's name with "fraud," he found a brief mention in a regional Marathi newspaper about a complaint filed by another buyer in a different district.
None of these checks required special access or a paid service. They took about 40 minutes in total. That 40 minutes saved a significant advance payment from disappearing.
The supplier had a legitimate-looking front. The document trail told a different story.
How Vetrade runs these checks together
I built Vetrade because I got tired of doing these checks manually, jumping between five different portals, and trying to hold everything in a spreadsheet. The tool is live at vetrade.unceasingimpex.com.
You enter a supplier's details — GSTIN, IEC, website, company name — and Vetrade runs IEC verification, GSTIN status check, Google Places address matching, a news and fraud scan, B2B platform detection across IndiaMART, TradeIndia, Alibaba, and JustDial, LinkedIn presence check, and SSL detection. It returns a verification report with a score and what we call Verification Gaps — areas where data is missing or inconsistent — rather than punishing a supplier for information that simply wasn't found.
That last point matters. Not every legitimate small exporter has a LinkedIn company page. A missing LinkedIn presence doesn't make them fraudulent. Vetrade treats missing data as neutral, and surfaces the gaps so you can ask the right questions directly.
Signup uses WhatsApp OTP. Reports are viewable on the web app. You get a structured picture of a supplier's verifiable footprint in a few minutes instead of an afternoon.
What these checks don't cover
It's important to be clear about what document-and-data verification can and can't do.
These checks tell you whether a supplier's registered identity is consistent, whether their compliance credentials are active, and whether their footprint matches their claims. They don't tell you about product quality, production capacity, or whether they'll meet your delivery timeline.
For high-value orders or long-term supply relationships, verification is the floor, not the ceiling. Physical factory visits, sample orders, third-party inspections, and trade references are still part of a complete due diligence process. What the checks above do is help you quickly eliminate the outright fraudulent before you invest more time and money in the relationship.
Think of it as triage. Run the quick checks first. If those pass, do the deeper work.
Summary
- Always verify IEC on the DGFT portal before dealing with any export supplier — an invalid or missing IEC is a hard stop.
- GSTIN verification on the GST portal confirms legal name, state, and whether the registration is active or cancelled.
- Cross-check the registered address against Google Maps and Places to catch entities that exist on paper but not in reality.
- Run a news and fraud search combining the company name, proprietor name, and phone number with terms like "fraud" and "FIR."
- Look for consistency across B2B platforms and LinkedIn — not volume of listings, but whether the details align.
- Verification Gaps are questions to ask, not automatic disqualifiers. A missing data point should prompt a direct conversation with the supplier, not an automatic rejection.
These checks won't take you more than an hour per new supplier. One saved advance payment covers a lot of hours. Start with the IEC and the GSTIN. The rest follows.
Questions about Vetrade? Email support@semperworks.com