Paid a charcoal supplier who went silent? The first 72 hours
By Mohamad Sinno, Charcoal Expert · Last updated
Ask AI for an importer brief:
The short answer
Call your bank's fraud department first and ask for a recall — before investigating, before confronting anyone, before anything else. Then preserve the bank's own records rather than screenshots of them. The practical window on an international wire is short, commonly given as 24 to 72 hours, and it closes when the receiving bank credits the money.
This page describes commercial practice and dated published conventions. It is not legal advice, and nothing on it is specific to your jurisdiction.
The sequence
| # | When | Do | Why, and what it needs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Immediately | Call your bank’s fraud department, not your relationship manager | Ask them to attempt a cancel, recall and trace while that is still possible, and to record the case. A dated convention across the recovery guides is that the practical window for an international wire is roughly 24 to 72 hours, and that recall rates fall sharply once the receiving bank has credited the beneficiary. |
| 2 | Same hour | Stop the next payment | Any balance, any further instalment, any second order. If details were changed by an email or a message, treat that channel as compromised and use one you established earlier. |
| 3 | First few hours | Preserve the bank record, not a picture of it | The debit advice or transfer confirmation, the beneficiary details, the payment purpose, the SWIFT message, the UETR, the intermediary-bank information, the recall request and every bank response. A cropped screenshot or a spreadsheet entry is a view of the record, not the record. |
| 4 | First day | Export the correspondence with its headers intact | Complete email and chat threads, originals rather than forwards, with full headers. This is the material that later shows when the payment instruction changed and where it came from. |
| 5 | First day | Decide which problem you have | Fraud and a quality dispute with a real supplier look similar on day one and have entirely different remedies. See the section below before you spend money on either. |
| 6 | Within the first days | File a police report and get its reference number | Several later steps — insurers, banks, platforms — ask for a report reference before they will act. Getting the number early is cheap; needing it and not having it is not. |
| 7 | Before spending more | Test whether a claim can reach anything | Establish whether the counterparty is a real entity with assets before paying for escalation. One trade lawyer’s guidance puts this explicitly before the decision to litigate, and it is the step most often skipped in the wrong direction. |
Sequence assembled from published recovery guidance by trade lawyers and verification services, read 4 September 2026; the individual conventions carry their own dates below.
Why the bank record, and not a screenshot
Every later path — the recall, the police report, an insurer, a platform — is built on documents your bank issues rather than on what you can see in an app. The list worth asking for by name is the debit advice or transfer confirmation, the beneficiary details, the payment purpose, the SWIFT message, the UETR, the intermediary-bank information, the recall request and every response to it (trade-lawyer guidance, 28 July 2026). The same source puts it more sharply than a checklist can: a screenshot is a view, not the source.
The same applies to the correspondence. Export the complete threads with their headers intact rather than forwarding a selection — the headers are what later show where a changed payment instruction actually came from.
Fraud, or a dispute with a real supplier?
This is the distinction none of the published guides makes, and getting it wrong is expensive in both directions. A supplier who has gone silent after taking money may be a fraud. They may also be a real company with a real problem — a failed production run, a rejected booking, a container held at origin — handling it badly.
The difference is usually visible in what exists. A real counterparty has a registration that resolves, a laboratory report whose number the laboratory confirms, a site that can be visited, and a bank account in its own registered name. If those check out, you probably have a commercial dispute, which has a remedy: a claims window, a defined basis, and a supplier with something to lose. Ours is within 7 days of receipt; after that the goods are deemed accepted, and it exists precisely so that a problem has a procedure instead of an argument.
If none of them checks out, you are in the other situation, and the steps above are the ones that matter. The checks themselves are on how to verify an Indonesian charcoal factory — worth running even now, because the answer decides which problem you are solving.
Never pay to get it back
A second approach frequently follows the first: someone offering to recover the money for a fee, sometimes claiming to work with an official reporting body. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3, ic3.gov) states plainly on its own front page that it "does not work with any non-law enforcement entity, such as law firms or crypto services, to recuperate lost funds or investigate cases", and that it "will never directly contact you for information or money" (read at the source, 5 September 2026).
Treat a recovery offer as the second stage of the same fraud. A documented variant is that identity documents submitted to a "recovery service" are resold (advisory-firm guidance, 15 April 2026) — so the cost is not only the fee.
Honest odds, and the gaps
Recovery is unlikely once the money has been credited and withdrawn, and it is meaningfully more likely inside the first day. That is as precise as this page will get, and the reason is worth stating: we found no recovery-rate figure we could stand behind. The numbers in circulation trace back to an unsourced claim, or to a regulator's report quoted by a vendor rather than read. A percentage would make this page feel more useful and would not be more true.
Two further gaps, named rather than filled. First, the widely cited criteria for when a cross-border fraud can be escalated through the US financial-fraud recovery process — a value threshold, an international transfer, a recall already initiated, a time limit — sit behind a source we could not read, and the reporting centre's own pages do not set them out where we looked on 5 September 2026. We have not reproduced them from second-hand accounts.
Second, where a foreign buyer reports a fraud committed from Indonesia. The published guides all end at the buyer's own bank and courts. Indonesia operates a national public complaint channel, lapor.go.id, which routes reports to the responsible government body and states its own timelines — verification within three days, agency follow-up within five (read at the source, 5 September 2026). It is a general government channel in Indonesian, and we have not established that it is the right route for a foreign buyer's fraud report specifically. That is the honest state of it: a channel that exists, and a question we have not answered.
Round two
Whatever happens with the money, the next order is the one you can control. The structural change that matters is not being more careful — it is never being one payment away from a total loss. A two-trigger payment structure, a supplier whose registration resolves, and a reference sample with a batch report behind it will defeat six of the seven patterns without requiring anyone to spot anything. Those protections, set against each pattern before any money moves, are laid out in the guide to charcoal supplier scams.
Questions
How long do I actually have to recall an international wire?
The commonly published window is 24 to 72 hours, and the practical constraint is the receiving bank rather than the clock: once the funds are credited to the beneficiary, recall rates fall sharply. This is why the first call goes to your bank’s fraud department before anything else, including before contacting the supplier.
What should I keep, and is a screenshot enough?
A screenshot is a view, not the record. Ask your bank for the debit advice or transfer confirmation, the beneficiary details, the payment purpose, the SWIFT message, the UETR, the intermediary-bank details, the recall request and every response to it. Export email and chat threads complete and with their headers intact rather than forwarding a selection.
How do I tell a fraud from a supplier who is just handling a problem badly?
By what exists. A real counterparty has a registration that resolves in a public register, a laboratory report whose number the laboratory confirms, a site that can be visited, and a bank account in its own registered name. If those check out you probably have a commercial dispute, which has a claims window and a defined remedy. If none of them does, you are in the other situation.
Should I use a service that offers to recover the money for a fee?
Treat it as the second stage of the same fraud. The United States’ internet crime reporting centre states on its own front page that it works with no non-law-enforcement entity, such as law firms or crypto services, to recuperate lost funds, and that it will never contact you for information or money. A documented variant of this approach resells the identity documents submitted to it.
If it would help to have a second pair of eyes on documents from a supplier you are unsure about, the export desk is on WhatsApp at +62 821 3924 038.