About
Equipment fraud works because the machine is always somewhere else. This site documents the sellers, the websites, the phone numbers, and the bank beneficiaries so that the next buyer's search returns something.
A tractor, an excavator, a fifth wheel, and a car hauler all have one thing in common as purchases: the good ones are rarely close by. Buyers have always bought sight-unseen from three states away, wired a deposit on a phone call, and arranged transport afterwards. That is a normal, functioning trade, and it is exactly the habit this fraud is built on.
The mechanics barely vary. A machine is listed well under market with a reason attached — a farm dispersal, a bank repossession, a contractor gone under, a fleet order cancelled. The seller cannot meet in person because of a deployment, a hospital stay, an estate, a busy season. A deposit secures it. Payment goes by wire, Zelle, or an escrow company the seller recommends, which is a website registered a fortnight ago. Then the fees start: transport bond, insurance, storage, customs, a final balance to release the load at a depot. There is no depot and there never was a machine.
What makes it scale is how disposable the front end is. The website is a costume. The photographs are lifted from a genuine dealer, a closed auction lot, or a completed listing on a trade site. The dealership history, the licence number, sometimes the entire inventory page belongs to a real business three states over, cloned onto a domain one word away from theirs. When complaints start, the domain is dropped and the whole thing reappears under a new name within days.
So the details worth recording are the ones that are expensive to change. A bank beneficiary name, a telephone number, an escrow company, a set of photographs, a wording pattern in a bill of sale — these get reused across rebuilds because replacing them costs the operator real friction. Documenting them is what connects a site registered on Tuesday to an operation that has been working the same trade for a year.
A report records what can be independently confirmed: when the domain was registered, where the machine photographs first appeared, whether the legal entity exists in the state register, whether a quoted dealer licence or DOT number resolves to the same company, what the yard address actually is, and which account received the wire. Anything resting on one unverified account is labelled as one unverified account.
These operations run to a timetable measured in weeks. A domain is registered, pushed hard through listings and ads, and abandoned the moment complaints start. A record published six months later is history. A record published within days can reach the next buyer while the site is still taking deposits.
Nobody researches equipment fraud as a subject. They type one dealer name, one website, or one phone number into a search bar in the ten minutes before they authorise a transfer. Every report is built so that search lands on the verdict, because that search is usually the last point at which the loss is still preventable.
Naming a legitimate dealership as fraudulent does real harm to a real business. Operators can submit documentation, and reports that turn out to be wrong are re-graded as cleared or withdrawn with a dated public note explaining what changed. Corrections are published, never applied quietly.
We cannot freeze a wire, compel a bank, or prosecute anyone. Call your bank first, then file with IC3 and your state attorney general. Those are the channels that can actually move on a recent transfer.
We never charge anyone who was defrauded and never offer to trace or retrieve funds. Everyone who contacts you after a loss offering exactly that is running the second half of the same trade.
An absence from this list means nobody has reported that seller yet. New sites are new precisely because nobody has documented them. Run the checks regardless of what any list says.
Six kinds of iron. The stories change constantly; the mechanics almost never do.
Tractors, combines, balers, and implements advertised well under market by sellers with no yard you can stand in.
Excavators, skid steers, dozers, and telehandlers sold by invented liquidators and cloned dealer sites.
Motorhomes, fifth wheels, and travel trailers offered by absent owners through invented escrow and transport firms.
Semi tractors, dump trucks, and service trucks sold against fake fleet disposals and borrowed DOT numbers.
Goosenecks, flatbeds, dumps, and enclosed haulers listed at prices no manufacturer or dealer can match.
Muscle cars, restorations, and collector vehicles sold through fake escrow, fake transport, and borrowed photographs.