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While there are certainly many legitimate advertising specialty product businesses which provide products beneficial to sales and promotions, others are illegal "boiler room" operations that use ad specialties to ensnare owners and employees of small companies in a fraud scheme.
These schemes are usually a variation of the Free Prize Scams covered under the Personal Security & Fraud section of this Web site.
In these variations, the business receives a phone call from a person claiming that the business or a specific person within the company has won a valuable prize. The catch is that to be eligible for the prize, a certain amount of advertising specially products must be purchased.
Often these products are key chains, T-shirts, caps, pens, ice scrapers and the like--individualized with the victim company name or logo.
Usually if an order is placed, the prize turns out to little more than worthless and the products are inferior. In other cases, nothing whatsoever is received by the victim and the fraudster simply cashes the check and moves on.
At Loss Prevention Concepts, Ltd. we recommend that businesses reject all high-pressure sales of any type and never make purchases of anything sight unseen. Additionally, it makes sense to check out any vendor company and obtain competitive quotes for all goods and services.
One wise move is to simply terminate the conversation if you recognize it to be a high-pressure sales pitch. Also, it's a wise policy to never prepay for goods and never accept C.O.D. shipments. By demanding that billing accompany the product delivery, businesses can retain the option of returning inferior products.
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