For anyone not familiar with it, @vip.163 is a generic email service like hotmail or gmail. It is not a company's dedicated email address.

and therfore @vip.163 addresses used by companies are a clear indication of fraud.

Many government officials and companies also use public email in west china. Having one's own domain name, website, and mail servers are still a relatively new thing out west.

IF they are posing. As two different companies, it is almost definitely a scam. but if I was doing business with Chinese. Companies, I would hire a good lawyer who will be able to do a background check to see if a company is legit.

While Michael is right that most small companies in China do not have their own domain names, thus uses free public email services, this is not true of large companies and quasi-state owned enterprises. A quick research of allow you to discover that Yunnan Yunnei Power Group does indeed have their own domain at www.yunneidongli.com/service/lian-xi-wo-men.htm .

In addition, the contact us page lists a email with said domain, it is therefore unlikely that an official within that company will be using a personal email account posing as an official looking email account to conduct official business.

If an official were to use a private email for official business which is common practice even if they do have an official account, to Michael's credit for being right on this, they would use seemingly random jumble of letters and numbers which is usually an acronym of their Chinese name or some other title. Examples of this can be found in our very own classifieds such as: zyhjasmine@, 1638484655@, shenzhouyn@, and lyxzh0323@.

As usual, Micheal's advice and insights are half-cocked, out-dated, or otherwise bad advice that contains enough semblance of truth to make it down right dangerous, much like the folksy, old-wives tale on how to cure a serious disease using "all natural, secret" formula that big pharma don't want you to know about.

I would take anything Michael says with a grain of salt....actually, I wouldn't take it at all.

PS:A quick number trace would tell you 1773913 is a prefix for numbers originating in Hunan, Anyang and not a Yunnan or Kunming number.

Hello, my name is Jose Antonio and I would really appreciate your help. Our company, South American equine seller, has received an email from: haoming6@vip.163.com , by the name of Cheng Hong project manager of the Yunnan Copper Group. Our company is not a big one and we are making a big effort to go to China. My boss has already bought the tickets but I’m afraid we are being fooled: During the mail exchange, and even though they put this company’s email address, the only contact is the @vip.163, which is weird considering that is a big company- according to what I researched. Secondly, they sent a contest model, but they want us to stay 3 days to finally sing it. And even though we told them we just have 1 day and we need them to talk us that’s ok, they avoid the answer. Can you please help me? Is their a way I can prove this is real or not? Thank you!

It is a scam.

@vip.com is an email like @gmail.com. It isn't the company official email. That is a red flag.