Spotting fake and AI-generated charcoal supplier websites
By Mohamad Sinno, Charcoal Expert · Last updated
Ask AI for an importer brief:
The short answer
Stop judging the page. A fabricated supplier site is now cheap to build and reads convincingly, so the useful checks are the ones a page cannot control: when the domain was registered, whether the imagery exists elsewhere, and whether the company resolves in a public register. All three are free and take about five minutes together.
The check sequence
| # | Check | How | Source class and date |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Domain registration date | Look the domain up in a WHOIS search and read the "Registered On" date. A newly created website is a red flag, and a site claiming decades of trading that was registered last month is answering the question for you. | consumer regulator, 17 August 2026; security vendor, 10 April 2026 |
| 2 | Reverse image search | Run the factory photographs, the product shots and the staff portraits through a free reverse image search. Stock or AI-generated staff photos are a documented tell, and product images that appear on other storefronts mean the images prove nothing about this one. | consumer regulator, 17 August 2026; security vendor, 10 April 2026 |
| 3 | The reviews, as a set | Read them together rather than individually. Near-identical phrasing, uniform enthusiasm and a tight cluster of dates describe the way the reviews were produced, not the supplier. | consumer regulator, 17 August 2026 |
| 4 | A registration that resolves | A supplier that publishes no registration anyone can look up has told you something. For an Indonesian supplier that lookup is the NIB in the OSS system, and it is free. | tell from consumer regulator, 17 August 2026; the Indonesian route is ours |
| 5 | Contact details, checked away from the site | Search the business name separately from the link you were given, rather than following the contact route the site offers. A site that mentions global fulfilment partners with no physical business address is a warning sign. | security vendor, 10 April 2026 |
| 6 | The imagery itself | AI-generated images often show unnatural hands, odd reflections and shadows, or slight facial distortions on close inspection. This is the weakest check on the list and it is getting weaker every year. | security vendor, 10 April 2026 |
The fourth row needs one honesty note. The tell — no registration anyone can look up — comes from a consumer regulator whose own verification route is a register of financial-services licensees in its country. The tell travels; that register does not. The Indonesian equivalent for a charcoal supplier is the NIB in the OSS system, and that mapping is ours, not something the regulator said. How to run it: verifying an Indonesian supplier's NIB and NPWP.
A composite, taken apart
What follows is assembled, not observed in one place. Every feature is a verified tell from the sources above or something we have seen in our own market; no single site is being described, and none is named. A real example with the name removed would be an accusation with the evidence withheld.
- A heritage claim the domain contradicts. "Twenty years of export experience" on a domain registered four months ago. This is the single highest-value check because the two facts sit on the same screen.
- A factory that appears elsewhere. Wide shots of a production hall and stacked cartons that reverse-search to a stock library, or to two other suppliers' websites. In our own market, the same facility imagery recurring across storefronts that claim no connection to each other is a pattern rather than a coincidence.
- Specifications that are too good and too round. A calorific value above what coconut shell charcoal reaches, burn times with no method attached, ash figures quoted without saying whether they are as-received or dry. A real report names its laboratory, its method and its number — which is exactly what to read on one.
- A certificate as an image. Present, impressive, and with no issuing body you can contact or number you can quote back to them.
- Text that has been somewhere before. Product copy that reappears almost word for word on another domain presented as an unrelated company. We have watched this happen in coconut charcoal specifically, including a company's own name left inside copy that had been lifted onto a competitor's site.
- A payment route that cannot be traced. An account in a personal name, a different company name, or a method with no recourse — which is the point at which a fabricated site stops being a marketing problem.
- An address that is not a place. Fulfilment partners named, no physical site given, and no offer to be visited.
One more, and it is the strangest thing in our own capture record: a domain that no longer resolves at all can still be served in search results as though it were a live supplier. A listing is not a company, and a search engine is not a register.
What the opposite looks like
The checks above are negative — they find what is missing. The positive version is a supplier that publishes things which would expose them if untrue, and it is fair to hold us to the same list:
- A registration block you can check. Our NIB and its issue date are on the documents page, verifiable in OSS by anyone, with the date we last checked it against the certificate.
- Corrections published against our own record. The same page carries what we got wrong and when we fixed it. A fabricated site has no reason to publish a correction, because nothing on it was ever meant to be checkable.
- Laboratory reports with numbers and dates, two of them downloadable, all of them nameable to the laboratory that issued them.
- An open invitation to visit the production site. The check that no website, however well built, can survive failing.
Five minutes, in order
Domain age first, because it is one lookup and it settles the heritage claim. Then reverse image search on the factory photograph, because it is the second cheapest and the most revealing. Then the registration lookup, which is the one that decides whether there is a company at all. The remaining checks refine a picture those three have usually already drawn.
If a site clears all three and you still have doubts, the questions that separate a factory from a storefront are on the questions to ask a charcoal factory, and the fraud shapes those doubts usually belong to are on the seven patterns. A site that was never a company is one entry in the wider guide to charcoal supplier scams, which pairs each fraud shape with the tell you can check for nothing.