Due to a stroke of good timing, I was selling face masks at the start of 2020 in Southeast Asia with a access to a global supply chain through the recent acquisition of my company. At the height of Covid, those sales grew to over 100,000,000 facemasks sold entirely through my dinky Hong Kong office.
I was on call 24 hours a day. Hong Kong was falling apart from the protests. My apartment got broken into and they stole everything I had even my jeans and swimsuit.
At one point I took a call and finally had some peace only to wake up with my apartment full of smoke at 3am. I looked down my windows to see my building was on fire. My first floor neighbor had gone insane and said he was starting fires to purify the air from covid. Firemen kept running by on the street to put out his fire and run away. I had to repeatedly explain to them in poor Chinese this guy was insane and just starting the fire as soon as they left. They finally understood.
All the while I was still fielding calls and messages. Meanwhile, all my employees, contractors, partners, and board members were quick to find ways to steal from our company and make sure they personally profited while people were dying.
I was impressed with the ingeniuity of their schemes:
Stockpiling
If you want to sell some masks and theres a shortage, buy them and hold at 1000% markup. But that’s just the obvious way.
Wait until the price goes down to deliver
Take the money upfront at a the highest markup. Claim shipping delays until the price goes down. Then deliver. For bonus points, deliver a small amount of legit masks, and 90% crappy knock off masks on time. Of course they will notice the knockoffs and want them replaced, but by the time they notice you can replace them at a much lower cost. This is the equivalent of a high school kid turning in a report with only the first few xpages typed out and the last 15 as corrupted symbols.
Lie about Quality
If you’re a supplier and your buyer doesn’t know much about masks. Sell him low grade kitchen masks and say they’re great. He probably doesn’t know the various certifications and ratings.
The Switcheroo
Show your buyer some great samples, on delivery show him another brand of useless masks meant for the kitchen.
Oops missed the Plane
If you book the planes and your guy booked way in advance, claim that half of the shipment couldn’t make it on the plane. Then secretly sell that extra space for way more money at a premium and force your current customer to pay you more for another plane later.
The Kickback
If you work in the company that is selling the masks. Make a deal with a supplier where you get a cut afterwards in exchange for the contract.
Advanced Kickback
Because the company is going to work with multiple suppliers, make a deal with a mask broker who then makes deals with every supplier for you. This is much harder to trace.
The Big Invoice
If you work for the government, particularly the Australian one, ask the mask company who isn’t connected to you at all to send you an invoice for a much higher amount than what you plan to pay. This allows your department to get a full reimbursement and just pocket the difference.
The Trade Route Expert
If you run the logistics hub in the company for a country and have multiple options like say 3 different airports and a trucking route to get to your destination. Don’t pick the cheapest or the fastest option. Pick the one that pockets the most money for you personally. They can’t even really check.
Even better, suggest the blackmarket route so they cant even check how competitive your pricing is.
The Double Buyer
If you’re a mask supplier sign the contract and agree to the masks by a certain date and price upfront. Take the money. Then allow people with cash upfront to buy the masks the day of for way more money.
Customs Tax
If you work for customs, confiscate a large amount of masks for testing. Take advantage of the vague and every changing rules of what kind of mask is allowed to leave your country and have a ton go missing. This happened in both China and the USA.
Request Cash on Delivery
Use your established brand to get slimmer margins and ask for cash on delivery. Then when they show up, refuse to the shipment and negotiate again. The American Club and even Amazon’s Asia division tried to strong arm us and could have made us go bankrupt.
Oops I didn’t get the delivery
Receive the delivery of facemasks and claim you didn’t get it. Even if they have your signature and photo of you receiving it, claim it wasn’t you to get a refund.
Advanced didn’t get the delivery
This time pretend you are someone important like the Police Commissioner of Hong Kong and try to get large amounts of PPE with cash on delivery with the idea you could steal the goods when they arrive.
The PPE Loan Fraud
Be our board member and make record profits during the pandemic but hire a guy entirely to milk the PPE loans like here: https://projects.propublica.org/coronavirus/bailouts/loans/international-bonded-couriers-inc-6440187700
Then buy a nice new house in Florida.
At one point, someone took a cut out of every stage of our business. I tried to do my best to thwart everyone and started to wonder if I should have just figured out a way to take a kickback myself.
I went off to hide out in Jeju Island, one of the few islands with 0 covid cases still, getting calls from different governments for facemasks thinking the world was ending because if they were calling my little company that means all the bigger, better known companies out there couldn’t help them.
It finally crescendoed when the I got a message from the Bangladesh government saying they had a shortage of body bags.
I coincidentally ran into Fahim, the contact, years later and found out it was only a precautionary order and they didn’t actually end up with a shortage. He’s a good friend now.