Suspicious order with Indonesia ship-to address

I just got a very suspicious order.

I mean, what business owner does not love to open their shipping cart and see an order more than ten times the size of an average order!

But that was my first red flag.

A few minutes quick research revealed quite a few red flags. One red flag alone does not cause me to cancel an order, but all together, this was too much.

Here are all the red flags of this particular order:

• many of the same item (who needs 4 of the same brand of baby sling?)*
• different country on the shipping and billing address. I have many good orders where the order is shipped to a different address than the billing address, but a different country is a red flag.
• shipping address in Indonesia. A bit of quick surfing reveals that they are now second for Internet fraud. It seems the scam is they claim the goods never arrived and do a credit card charge-back, leaving me out the goods. Which brings me to my last point,
• a request to ship via USPS Priority Mail, not Express - the claim being that Express mail causes them to have to pay higher taxes. It all goes to the same post office, so I highly doubt that one would incur higher tax than the other. Express Mail International is a highly reliable and highly trackable service. It is also insured. I am not quite understanding how using Priority gets them around this but perhaps their post office doesn't treat it very well and the charge back claims hold up somehow. How awful that credit card companies go along with this.

Sorry, prospective customer, but not today am I willing to give away this much inventory. Perhaps you'd like a nice free pencil sharpener instead?

Wouldn't it be ironic if the person who placed this order was just a mom, trying to make a little extra cash for food for her kids, just like me?


*Except a reseller - and in that case, they should be getting their own wholesale account