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Quick Question Friday, China Law Answers, Part XXXVII
Because of this blog, our China lawyers get a fairly steady stream of China law questions from readers, mostly via emails but occasionally via blog comments as well. If we were to conduct research on all the questions we get asked and then comprehensively answer them, we would become overwhelmed. So what we usually do is provide a super fast general answer and, when it is easy to do so, a link or two to a blog post that may provide some additional guidance. We figure we might as well post some of these on here as well. On Fridays, like today.
In yesterday’s post, Defrauded by an Alibaba Seller? Here’s What To Do, we talked about what to do if you order and pay for a product on Alibaba, but receive nothing in return or something way way different from what you have ordered. In response to that post, I received two incredibly similar emails, about ten minutes apart (so similar in fact, that they may have been from the same person, using different email addresses). The emails essentially said the following:
Great post on recouping funds from an Alibaba fraud seller, but isn’t it true that even after doing all that you say in the post you will end up with nothing?
No, that’s not true. Not going to get up anyone’s hopes here, but recovering on this sort of fraud is a lot like recovering anything in China. If you can actually trace the actual scammer quickly your odds of getting maybe half of what you lost are probably a bit less than 50-50. This is just a somewhat informed estimate based on the experience of the China lawyers in my law firm and on what we have heard from other China attorneys who, but I think it is a fairly accurate measure to use to determine whether it will be worth pursuing the person or entity that stole your money. So just by way of one example. If you lost $300,000, you have a roughly 50% chance of recovering $150,000. It therefore would probably be worth it to you to spend $10,000 to get to a point where you can then make a new decision as to whether to proceed. But if you lost $30,000, you have about a 50% chance of recovering $15,000 and so it probably is not worth it to spend $10,000 to get a better feel for your chances.
Would love to hear from anyone else about how they do these sort of calculations.
We will be discussing the practical aspects of Chinese law and how it impacts business there. We will be telling you what works and what does not and what you as a businessperson can do to use the law to your advantage. Our aim is to assist businesses already in China or planning to go into China, not to break new ground in legal theory or policy.
Source: http://www.chinalawblog.com/2017/01/quick-question-friday-china-law-answers-part-xxxvi-2.html
