CHS Lubricants has become aware of a few reports of scam activity from local distributors reporting orders for large quantities of quart bottles. We wanted to remind you to increase awareness and caution of fraudulent activity across your organizations.
This specific scam involves a buyer identifying themselves as a “representative” for a commercial customer with approved credit and on-going business transactions with the local distributor. The order includes a request for truckload or large orders of quart-sized bottles.
Due to quick thinking by the targeted customers, no orders have been lost due to this scam, but increasing awareness of this request will hopefully prevent all of our customers from falling victim to this fraudulent order.
What you should do:
- Build awareness of what scams look like within your organizations.
- Validate your customer relationship and their representatives before allowing the representative to take possession of products. Do not give out customer information when validating details.
- Contact the customer by phone
- Verify the email account on file – this should correspond to the commercial customer noted and not be a personal email account (e.g., AOL.com, gmail.com)
- Contact your local law enforcement if you have become victim to the scam or have additional information about any fraudulent activity.
