How to verify a Brazilian sugar supplier before you pay.

1. Does the company exist? Look up the CNPJ

Every Brazilian company has a CNPJ, its federal tax registration. Receita Federal issues a registration certificate (the comprovante de inscrição) that shows the date the company was opened, its legal name, its main and secondary activities (CNAE codes), its legal nature, its address, and its registration status with the date that status began. The gov.br service page says the lookup also covers the company’s partners and administrators (the QSA). Depending on the channel, Receita may ask you to sign in with a gov.br account; if you have no Brazilian login, a Brazilian contact or your bank can pull it for you.

What to read on it:

• Status. Receita uses ativa, suspensa, inapta, baixada and nula. Anything other than ativa ends the conversation.
• Date opened. Compare it with the history the seller claims. Twenty years of exports from a company opened last spring is a lie you can catch in a minute.
• Activities. Check that the CNAE codes include making or trading the product you are buying.
• Name and address. These must match the contract and the bank account exactly, letter for letter.

A clean, active CNPJ proves the company exists. It does not prove the deal is real. Fraud rings have bought properly registered companies precisely for their clean history. See pattern 02 in how sugar fraud works.

2. Can it export? Check its habilitação (RADAR)

To clear goods through Brazilian customs, an exporter needs habilitação, an authorisation granted by Receita Federal and recorded in the system known as RADAR. Anyone, in Brazil or abroad, can check a company’s habilitação for free by entering the first eight digits of its CNPJ on the Portal Único Siscomex. That lookup replaced the old Receita page, which closes on 30 September 2026.

Be precise about what it shows: whether the company is authorised, and in which modality. It does not show what the company has exported, or how much. The limits attached to the modalities apply to imports only; Receita states there is no limit on exports.

There is no public list of Brazilian exporters to check against; SECEX stopped publishing it and removed past editions for tax-secrecy reasons. So habilitação is what you can check when a seller calls itself a registered exporter.

3. Is the bank real, and is the account in the seller’s name?

SWIFT runs a free BIC search on swift.com that returns the registered name and address for a bank’s BIC (the code in the payment details). For a Brazilian bank, the Banco Central do Brasil publishes the list of institutions authorised to operate in foreign exchange.

Then apply one rule without exceptions: the account holder’s name must match the company on your contract exactly. Money steered to a “logistics”, “finance partner” or “attorney” account is the scam, however it is explained. The FBI’s advice for changed payment details is to confirm them by phone, on a number you already had, never one from the email asking for the change.

4. Is the email really from them?

Business email compromise, where fraudsters pose as a real company or tamper with a real thread, cost 55.5 billion US dollars in exposed losses across 305,033 reported incidents between October 2013 and December 2023, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). In 2023 the IC3 warned specifically about criminals using look-alike domains to buy commodities in real companies’ names.

• Read the domain letter by letter. The IC3’s examples are plain misspellings, one character off.
• Type the company’s official domain yourself. Do not trust the address that contacted you, or the name of a real employee attached to it.
• Check when the domain was registered. ICANN’s free lookup (lookup.icann.org) shows the registration date. Registro.br runs the equivalent lookup for .br domains.
• A free webmail address for a company that claims to ship thousands of tonnes is a reason to stop.

What none of this proves

All four checks confirm the entity. None confirms the cargo. The order that protects you is entity, then cargo, then bank, before any instrument is issued. Cargo is confirmed by independent pre-shipment inspection written into the contract, and by paying against documents under a letter of credit that names the certificates you need. Those two steps are covered in what protects you if sugar arrives off-spec and transferable vs non-transferable letters of credit.