How to Verify a Supplier in India Before Wiring Money

I've transferred money to a supplier exactly once without running a proper check. I lost ₹2.3 lakh. That was in 2019. I won't make that mistake again — and neither should you.

This is not a theoretical guide. It's the exact sequence I now run before any new Indian supplier gets a rupee from me. Some of this takes two minutes. Some takes twenty. None of it is optional when the ticket size is more than you're willing to lose.

Why verification matters more than you think

Most supplier fraud in Indian trade doesn't look like fraud at first. It looks like a slightly better price, a faster response time, a supplier who agrees to your terms without pushback.

The scam runs in phases. First order goes smoothly — small quantity, everything fine, you're relieved. Second order is bigger. Third order is the one where the goods don't arrive, or arrive wrong, or the supplier goes dark after the advance.

By the time you realise what happened, the entity you wired money to may be dissolved, renamed, or operating under a borrowed GSTIN in a different state. Legal recovery across state lines in India takes 18–36 months and rarely pays out. Verification is cheaper than litigation by three orders of magnitude.

Step 1 — Verify the IEC on the DGFT portal

The Import Export Code is issued by DGFT and is mandatory for any entity doing cross-border trade. Ask the supplier for their IEC number and verify it at https://www.dgft.gov.in.

What to confirm:

• Legal name matches what they've put on the quotation and invoice
• PAN is consistent with other documents they've shared
• Address matches the city and state they claim to operate from
• Status is Active — not inactive, suspended, or cancelled

An IEC is a minimum filter, not a trust signal. It tells you the entity is registered for cross-border trade. It tells you nothing about their operational history, financial health, or whether they intend to deliver.

But a supplier with no IEC who claims export experience, or with a suspended IEC they haven't mentioned, is already lying to you in the first exchange.

Step 2 — Verify the GSTIN on the GST portal

Every GST-registered Indian business has a 15-digit GSTIN. Enter it at https://www.gst.gov.in and confirm:

• Legal name — should match the IEC-registered name exactly. Discrepancies like "Sharma Exports Pvt Ltd" on IEC and "Sharma Enterprises" on GSTIN are not branding choices. They need a clear explanation.
• State code — the first two digits of the GSTIN encode the state. A Pune-based factory with a Delhi GSTIN should raise an eyebrow.
• Nature of business — registered as "manufacturer," "trader," or "wholesaler"? Does this match what they're actually selling you?
• Registration date — a GSTIN opened three weeks before they first contacted you isn't disqualifying by itself, but it changes what you need to verify next.
• Status — Active, Suspended, or Cancelled. Suspended means they've missed filings. That's a financial health signal.

Pay particular attention to return filing compliance. The GST portal shows whether a business has been regularly filing returns. A "manufacturer" who hasn't filed GSTR-1 in six months is either dormant or in trouble.

Step 3 — Check their B2B platform presence

Real Indian suppliers leave a footprint on the major B2B platforms: IndiaMART, TradeIndia, JustDial, and for exporters, Alibaba. Check all four.

What you're looking for:

• Listed on at least two platforms with consistent name, contact number, and address
• Account age — not created last month with a "Trusted" badge they paid for
• Product categories that match what they're actually quoting you
• Phone number matches the one you've been talking to

The important caveat: IndiaMART's "Trust Seal" is a paid badge, not a due-diligence certificate. B2B presence is one data point among many. Its absence, however, is a strong signal — a supplier claiming years of export experience with no B2B footprint either never traded at the volumes they're claiming, or went to lengths to avoid a traceable digital record.

Step 4 — Google the address

Punch their stated address into Google Maps. Look for:

• A registered Google Business Profile at that exact address with the same company name
• Photos of the premises — especially interior shots. Fraudsters almost never invest in fake interior photography.
• Reviews, even negative ones. A real business accumulates a record over time.
• Street View — does a factory or warehouse actually exist at that location, or is it a residential lane or an empty plot?

If the address resolves to a co-working space, a residential apartment, or doesn't resolve at all, ask for a video walk-through before anything else. One 15-minute video call from the factory floor is worth more than a hundred WhatsApp photos.

Step 5 — Run the news and fraud scan

This is the step most traders skip. It is the one that has saved me the most money.

Take three things separately — the company name, the proprietor or director's name, and the registered address — and run Google searches on each with the words "fraud", "case", and "complaint" appended.

Also check consumer complaint forums: Consumer Complaints India, MouthShut, and trade-specific forums. One credible result is usually enough to walk away.

Fraudsters tend to repeat the same pattern with renamed entities. A news trail from 18 months ago is still predictive. If a case was filed against "Ravi Exports" in Surat and your new supplier is "Ravi International" in Surat with the same proprietor name, that is not a coincidence you should ignore.

Step 6 — Check the LinkedIn footprint

By 2026, any supplier doing serious export business has some LinkedIn presence — a company page, a founder profile with actual posts and connections, employees listed.

What mismatches look like:

• A company claiming ₹50 crore annual turnover with two employees on LinkedIn
• A founder profile created in the last three months with no prior history
• A company page with zero posts, no followers, and no tagged employees

A supplier who exists on every government database but has zero professional LinkedIn presence is either very small, very offline, or manufactured for this transaction. All three warrant investigation.

Step 7 — Cross-reference everything

Now take all the names and addresses you've collected and lay them next to each other:

| Source | Registered name | Address | |---|---|---| | IEC (DGFT) | | | | GSTIN (GST portal) | | | | IndiaMART listing | | | | Google Maps | | | | LinkedIn page | | | | Website About page | | |

Discrepancies across these sources are the strongest fraud signal in this entire checklist. Legitimate businesses have coherent identities across databases because they registered them over years in the normal course of operations. Fraudulent entities are assembled quickly, and the stitching shows.

Some discrepancies are innocent — a sole proprietor trading under a brand name, a recent rebrand. If you find them, ask directly in writing and expect a clean answer. Vague deflection is not a clean answer.

Step 8 — Read the digital silence

The most sophisticated red flag is also the easiest to miss.

A legitimate 8-year-old trading company has some mess behind it — a random complaint about slow delivery from 2021, a conference photo from 2023, an export data entry somewhere, a Glassdoor review, an archived press release. Real businesses leave traces.

An entity with a perfect, uniform, entirely recent digital footprint — three-month-old LinkedIn, fresh Google profile, brand-new website, sparkling IndiaMART listing, no archive history — is too clean.

Fraudsters build in weeks what real businesses accumulate in years. If everything about a supplier was created in the last four to six months and they're asking for lakhs upfront, walk away or dig ten layers deeper.

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Vetrade runs all eight of these checks in parallel and returns a single verification report in under 60 seconds — DGFT, GSTN, IndiaMART, TradeIndia, JustDial, Alibaba, Google Places, LinkedIn, news sources. The same sources I'd check manually, in a fraction of the time: vetrade.unceasingimpex.com

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The one check that stopped a ₹6 lakh loss

A few years ago I was close to wiring an advance to a textile accessories supplier in Surat. IEC valid. GSTIN active. IndiaMART listing with decent reviews. Website with SSL. All eight checks were looking clean.

Step 8 — the digital silence check — stopped me.

Every single piece of their online presence had been created within a six-week window, five months before we started talking. The LinkedIn was three weeks older than the IndiaMART listing. The website domain registration date matched. There was nothing older. No archive.org record. No news. No older export data.

I asked for a video call from the factory floor. Three days of delays. Then a call from what was clearly a shared office space — no machinery, no warehouse, no workers in frame.

I didn't wire the money. Six months later, a colleague in the same trade got hit by what looked like the same operation — renamed entity, same industrial estate in Surat, same fragrance. His loss: ₹6.2 lakh and three months of recovery time.

The check that saves you is almost never the obvious one. It's the eighth check, after the first seven passed.

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Key Takeaways

• Verify IEC on DGFT and GSTIN on the GST portal before anything else — name, address, and status must all match
• Check at least two B2B platforms for consistent, aged presence — absence is a red flag
• Google the address and look for a real physical footprint, not just a pin on a map
• Run a news and fraud scan on the company name, director name, and address separately
• Cross-reference names and addresses across all sources — discrepancies are your strongest fraud signal
• A too-clean, too-recent digital footprint is a red flag, not a reassurance

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Have questions or a fraud case you want to share? WhatsApp Aditya directly: +91-7517231254