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EquipmentScam ReportReport a seller

2 sellers on record

Construction & Earthmoving scams

Excavators, skid steers, dozers, and telehandlers sold by invented liquidators and cloned dealer sites.

Sellers reported
2
Total paid by buyers
$313,500
Buyers on record
6

How it runs

Buying excavators, skid steers, and dozers from a seller you cannot visit

The cover story is almost always a liquidation: a contractor gone under, a rental fleet being cycled out, a bank disposing of repossessed iron. It explains both the price and the hurry. The site carries a full yard of inventory — Cat 315s, Bobcat T770s, Deere 333Gs — with serial numbers, hour meters, and inspection reports that look convincing because they were copied from live listings on real auction platforms. Many of these sites are near-exact clones of a genuine dealership, running a domain one character or one suffix away from the real one, with the real company's history, staff photographs, and sometimes its dealer licence number reprinted verbatim. Buyers who call the number on the site reach the operator, not the dealership. A deposit is requested to hold the machine against other interest, then a balance before transport, then a transport bond, then an inspection fee, each demand arriving after the last one was paid.

Four checks that end it

  1. 01Type the dealership's name into a search engine separately and call the number on the result, not the number on the site you were sent to.
  2. 02Check the domain registration date. A twenty-year-old dealership does not operate from a domain registered last quarter.
  3. 03Verify the dealer licence and EIN with the issuing state, not with the seller.
  4. 04Treat any deposit to hold a machine as money gone. Genuine dealers invoice a business account in the business name.

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