Commodity transactions in this region routinely involve more intermediaries than either the buyer or the seller initially expects. Some of that is normal — brokers add value by connecting parties, arranging logistics, or bridging language and jurisdiction gaps. The risk is not the presence of intermediaries. It is the presence of intermediaries whose relationship to the actual producer cannot be independently confirmed.
The clearest warning sign is an authorisation letter that cannot be verified with the party it claims to come from. A letter stating that an individual or company is authorised to sell on behalf of a named producer is only as good as the producer's confirmation that it was issued, is current, and has not been revoked. That confirmation has to come through a channel the buyer controls — a phone number or email address obtained independently, not one supplied by the intermediary presenting the letter. When that verification step is skipped, the letter is not evidence of authorisation; it is a document that says it is.
Commission structures are the second signal worth reading carefully. Legitimate brokerage commissions are commercially explicable — they reflect the value of access, logistics, or relationship the intermediary is providing. Structures that only make financial sense if the underlying transaction is fraudulent — commissions payable only on an advance fee, or structured around getting a buyer to release funds before any verifiable delivery — are a different category of risk entirely, and they appear more often than buyers expect in this market.
Chain-of-title breaks are the third pattern. Every step in an intermediary chain should be traceable back to the producer: who holds the material, who has the right to sell it, and who is contractually able to transfer that right to the next party in the chain. A break anywhere in that chain — a party who cannot demonstrate how they came to have the authority they claim — means the buyer's eventual counterparty may not actually be able to deliver what is being offered, whatever assurances have been given along the way.
None of this means treating every intermediary with suspicion. It means applying the same discipline to the chain of authorisation that would be applied to the commodity itself: verify the claim independently of the party making it, at the source, before value changes hands.
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