News June 17, 2025
Florida Promo Firm Warns of Scammer’s Attempted T-Shirt Swindle
Printing Studio said the request for thousands of T-shirts came through a website order form.
Key Takeaways
• Attempted Fraud Foiled: Printing Studio (asi/789642) identified and avoided a scam involving 2,000 blank T-shirts.
• Telltale Signs of a Con: The scammers used an unprofessional email, requested a large blank shirt order and provided a residential shipping address.
• Ongoing Industry Threat: The scam is similar to others that have, in instances, led to distributors being duped.
A scammer tried to con a Florida-based promo company into providing 2,000 T-shirts, but the industry firm sniffed out the swindle.
Now, Vic Berggren, owner of Printing Studio (asi/789642), is warning others to be leery that these types of con artists continue to target the promotional products industry.
“I want to help ensure nobody gets burned,” Berggren told ASI Media.
The scam followed a pattern that has become commonplace in promo – but that, despite its prevalence, still ensnares some distributors and apparel decorators.
The crook contacted Printing Studio through a website order form with a request for about 2,000 Gildan (asi/56842) cotton-poly blend T-shirts with no print. The person asked the blank apparel to be shipped to a residence in Pennsylvania and was interested in getting a discount given the “larger quantity” order.
“There were a lot of red flags,” said Berggren.
Those included that the swindler gave a Gmail account as contact information, rather than a professional email address, and that it was a large-quantity order out of the blue from an unknown person. Also, no questions were made about inventory, freight or turnaround time, and the would-be trickster wanted the goods shipped to a residential address – rather than an office or warehouse. The fact that the request was for blank shirts was a major tell, too.
Ultimately, Printing Studio didn’t fulfill the order. And when Berggren and his staff started asking questions, the scammer broke off communication.
Berggren said this rip-off attempt was fairly easy to spot. Still, others advanced by criminals in a similar vein have proven more difficult to detect.
Those involve scammers posing as buyers for real universities, businesses, nonprofits and other organizations. The aim is to trick industry professionals into providing what often amounts to five or six figures’ worth of products for which the con artists will never pay.
While many savvy promo firms spot the scams before fulfilling the requests, other industry companies have been victimized, sometimes sustaining six-figure losses. Even seasoned professionals with decades of experience say variations of this scam have been so tricky that they were nearly taken in.