We recently came across a TikTok account teaching its followers how to pretend to be a factory.
Not how to build one. Not how to partner with one. How to pretend to be one.
The advice was detailed, practical, and apparently popular. Pick a company name that sounds like a manufacturer. Learn to speak like a factory owner. Visit a real factory once, film everything you can, and use that footage as your “proof” across social media. And if a buyer wants to visit — brief the actual factory in advance, show up as the “sales manager,” and let the factory play along.
The final tip was the most telling: get the buyer to wire payment into the factory’s bank account, then collect your commission on the back end. The buyer thinks they’re paying the manufacturer directly. They’re not.
We’ve been in this industry for over 20 years, combined. We weren’t shocked by the playbook. We were shocked that someone was teaching it openly on social media.
This Is Not Rare. This Is the Norm.
Here’s something most importers don’t know:
The vast majority of suppliers you find on social media, on Alibaba, on sourcing platforms — are not factories.
We’re not guessing. We visit factories as part of our work. In recent years, when e-commerce clients have asked us to audit a supplier they found online, the result has been consistent: almost without exception, what presents itself as a factory is a trading company. Sometimes a one-person trading company operating from a home office.
Even among traditional trade suppliers — companies with websites, offices, and years of history — perhaps one or two in ten are actual manufacturers. The rest are intermediaries of varying quality, transparency, and reliability.
We want to be clear: we are not saying trading companies are always bad partners. Some of our own suppliers are brand-authorized distributors. Trading companies serve legitimate functions in the supply chain.
The problem is not what they are. The problem is when they lie about what they are.
Why the Lie Matters
Imagine you place an order with someone who tells you they’re the factory.
They’re not. They’re a middleman. The actual factory is their supplier — a separate business with its own priorities, its own capacity constraints, and no contractual obligation to you whatsoever.
Now something goes wrong. The product has a defect. The shipment is late. You go back to your “factory” contact. They go back to their actual supplier. The supplier says it’s not their problem. Your contact says it’s not their problem either. You are caught in the middle of a dispute between two parties who both have more incentive to protect themselves than to protect you.
And here’s the part that matters most: a one-person trading company has almost nothing to lose.
No factory equipment. No long-term workforce. No significant assets. If things get bad enough, they close the account, open a new one, and start again with a clean slate. Their cost of exit is nearly zero.
Your cost? Potentially everything you paid.
This is what information asymmetry looks like in practice. You don’t know who you’re actually dealing with. They know exactly what they’re doing. That gap — between what you know and what they know — is where the risk lives.
The Foundation of Every Trade Relationship Is Identity
We’ve been doing this long enough to have a simple rule:
If a partner lies about who they are at the start of a relationship, everything that follows is built on that lie.
You can negotiate a good price. You can get strong samples. You can agree on clear terms. But if the person across the table started the relationship with a fundamental deception about their own identity, you have no reliable baseline for anything they tell you afterward.
Trust in business is built on understanding. You have to know who someone is before you can trust what they say. When that foundation is missing — when you genuinely don’t know whether you’re talking to a manufacturer or a middleman pretending to be one — you’re not building a business relationship. You’re building on sand.
How to Break Through the Information Gap
The good news is that this kind of deception rarely survives contact with an experienced third party.
A trading company pretending to be a factory has constructed a story. That story holds up against buyers who don’t know what to look for. It falls apart quickly when someone who does know what to look for walks through the door.
An experienced factory auditor can identify a trading company within minutes of an on-site visit. The tells are everywhere: the scale of the facility, the presence or absence of tooling and production equipment, the way staff respond to technical questions, the relationship between the contact person and the workers on the floor.
The TikTok playbook we described at the start of this article specifically addresses how to handle factory visits — because the people running this scheme know that a real visit is the one thing that breaks their cover.
So the most important thing you can do is send someone they can’t fool.
When evaluating a third-party sourcing or inspection partner, look for:
Registration and legal standing — Are they a registered business in China? Can they provide documentation? A legitimate operation has nothing to hide.
A physical office — Not a virtual address. A real office with real staff. This is verifiable.
Operational history — How long have they been running? Fly-by-night operations don’t survive long. Legitimate businesses do.
Experienced leadership — Who founded the company? What is their background? Years of direct experience in factory auditing, quality control, and supply chain management are not easy to fake.
Who We Are
Tom Sourcing was founded in 2020. We are registered in both China and the United States, with physical offices and a warehouse in China.
Our co-founder Thomas has over 20 years of experience across multinational corporations and international trade — including factory auditing, quality control, and project management across multiple industries and supply chains.
When we visit a supplier on your behalf, we know what we’re looking at. We’ve seen the playbook. We know the tells. And we know how to find the truth before it becomes your problem.
If you’re sourcing from China and want to know who you’re actually dealing with, let’s talk.