Many, many people think that lawyering is easy, that it's a matter of mouthing threatening words and acting like the TV lawyers act. Many people don't think they should pay because "lawyers don't actually do anything."

They get what they pay for.

I have run into several people over the years who have come to Hong Kong without any real idea of what the job they were hired for entailed or what the cost of living is here.

It is amazing how many people will move from the US or UK to take a commission sales job in a field they know nothing about, in a place where they don't speak the language.

They end having to beg people they've met here or family for airfare home.

But why would anyone, ANYONE deposit money with someone overseas without doing due diligence and having a local agent?

It boggles the mind

An aside: Great way to block quote everyone's views in black and white instead of just getting us to click through, something I think more bloggers should try because the biggest blog passion-kill for me is having a post laden with clickable links that draw me away from the main event, and bloggers: you don't want to leech your traffic that way!

But back to the matter at hand: the enormity of the Chinese (non-expat) business community makes due diligence checking tough or expensive, in the defense of a lot of the serial scam-ees (not the scammers). For $3,000, someone probably thinks "it's good enough, let's move ahead with this."

Here in Prague, for instance, the expatriate community and business scene is so comparatively pocket-sized to China's, all of us practically know each other, who's good, who's bad, who's crooked (or slightly bent), if not having done business or had dealings with them ourselves at a certain stage. Getting word out on the street about someone who's mendacious or an out-and-out challenge to deal with is relatively easy, and especially in post-Communist countries like the Czech Republic, nothing is ever a secret, at least not forever. That can be a bad thing, too.

Another little trick which you didn't mention, Counselor, is to first attempt a smaller deal with someone before embarking on the big deals. Tim Ferriss wrote about that in his first cut of The Four Hour Workweek, whereby he used to subcontract web (not wet!) work to Indian designers and other programming techs, never exceeding billable sums of $400 or so -- in fact, he'd even cap the job at a certain hour in advance, telling them they would not get paid beyond $400's worth of work, no matter how many hours they invested. Using this technique, he was usually very satisfied with the deliverables. He would often say that his worst case scenario was that he'd be out of pocket a few hundred bucks, never giving away the store in terms of full access to his web profiles or database servers -- thank goodness for multiple access profiles to WordPress, web databases, etc. I think more people should try this -- albeit, subtly (because it can come off as really manipulative) -- before going the whole hog.

Also, I'm shocked more people plainly don't want to engage in at least some basic research to source contingency vendors/lawyers/service professionals, if only because one professional could get knocked out of commission for a handful of perfectly valid reasons (egs. family obligations, illness, overwork, lack of interest, etc.) and then where would their case be, especially in a firm of one? :-)

A mentor I had about 15 years ago once told me: "If it's good today, it's good tomorrow too," and that was just about the best advice he could have given to an up-and-comer at the time. It's still valid today.