A proforma invoice holds a deal the way a picture holds a product

In November 2022, a buyer paid USD 34,600 to a trading company in Suzhou. One proforma invoice, 4,000 units of a corporate-gift product. Payment terms: 100% T/T advance. Delivery: about 10 days after payment.

In the end, the goods never shipped. Not in ten days, not in ten weeks. After the money landed, the supplier just went quiet and stayed quiet.

I knew this buyer before the order — at some point he had asked about my terms. My offer was to manage the deal end to end in China, from sourcing and execution through to export. Anyway, he preferred to handle it himself, and I left it at that, since my job is execution, not persuasion.

A few months later he came back with a different question: can you reach this supplier?

I made a couple of attempts to call the phone number recorded in the PI — nobody picked up. Then I added that number on WeChat and texted a greeting. Once a reply came, I named the order, sent the proforma, and asked about the goods. Nothing since.

That exchange is the entire recovery process. There is no next step that changes anything. A proforma invoice signed by one side, which means nothing. A foreign buyer with no entity in China. A sum large enough to hurt and small enough that legal action costs more than it returns. Every route exists on paper — none of them moves.

The bank account was real. What went unnoticed is that a proforma invoice is a file anyone can assemble in a few minutes. No signature of the other party, no real corporate stamp, no obligations — no weight. It promised nothing except where to send the money. And it was still taken as sufficient grounds for a USD 34,600 transfer. No company check, no reference, no visit — a counterparty known only as a name on a PDF.

Strange as it sounds, this is not a rare case. Plenty of buyers wire a tidy sum to China on the strength of one proforma alone. The same people, buying something for a few hundred dollars at a shop around the corner, will keep the receipt, ask for a proper invoice, or even request an extra document just in case. A PDF from a supplier they have never met, asking for tens of thousands, somehow raises no questions.

The money never came back. The last message in that chat is still mine.