I once had a company that procured very simple electronics (fingerprint readers) from Taiwan and due diligence included travelling there, meeting every single person in the engineering office in person, then touring the contract factory where this would be built, then negotiating shipping and even driver development details.

This took all of one week and the price of a few plane tickets. We didn’t have the cash for professional auditors. In the end we got a product that worked, and even at a lower price (negotiating at a distance is not effective).

Hard to have sympathy

I think like credit card charbacks make harder for Americans to develop a healthy intuition on smaller stuff and eventually they get hit big.