Business Scams

[fatandwheezing]

My job involves selling industrial equipment to a wide range of markets in many countries. We often get inquiries from completely unexpected places, typically either specific about the product they need, or a bit more general, but at least referencing the type of product/system they need, and asking for help in what to look for.

Aside from all of these, we regularly get completely generic looking e-mails asking for the price list for our products, and shipping terms, and waffling about long term business partnerships and such, but never once mentioning anything about the product/industry/application. This leads me to believe they are bulk sent, and there must be some kind of scam, but I cannot for the life of me think what other than a competitor making a crap attempt at price checking.

Any ideas how this might shaft us?

The one genuine scam we almost got caught out by was a very detailed inquiry with product details and part numbers researched which resulted in a dodgy and very likely to not clear, payment for several times the value being made. The idea on this being that we refund the "mistaken payment", which then gets bounced, hence a free load of cash for our dodgy friends.

We also regularly get the "someone is trying to register your domain name" one.

Any other common scams about?