Drop shipping has three dominant scams and each has several variations only limited to the imagination of these opportunists. I call the three scams the list, the middleman, and the agent.
List
First is the decades old list of drop shippers the scammer wants to sell to you. None of the businesses or contact information has been verified for years and is completely out of date. These lists are usually offered for between £10 - £50. After handing over your money, you try contacting the businesses only to learn:
• They have gone out of business
• The contact information is obsolete
• Stopped drop shipping years ago
Middlemen
Another common scam is the middleman posing as a drop shipper. This version does require that a real drop shipper exist. It is not the person you will be doing business with. He simply passes your order onto the real drop shipper, who packages and mails the product to your customer. Of course, the price he has offered you is substantially higher than what he pays the drop shipper.
Agents
These can be thought of as Multi Level Marketing (MLM) scams. The agent here charges victims a monthly fee to access the drop shipper. Quite often, they are also getting a cut from the drop shipper for any sales that you make.