Privacy policy

We collect as little as possible. Buyers appear under a first name or initials only, or anonymously on request. Your email address, phone number, home address, banking details, and payment records are never published. Nothing is sold or rented to anyone.

Nothing in the form is required beyond the seller name and a description of what happened. If you would rather we have no way to contact you, leave the email field blank and submit anyway.

• The incident details you describe: the dealer name and website, the equipment and category, the amount, the payment rail, the bank beneficiary you were given, and the dates.
• Any name or initials you choose to give, and an email address if you want an analyst to be able to follow up.
• Files you email voluntarily, such as listing screenshots, invoices and bills of sale, transport paperwork, text and email threads, or wire receipts.

A published report contains the trading name and website of the reported seller, open-source records about that business, the phone numbers and email addresses it used to solicit buyers, the bank beneficiary and any escrow or transport company it introduced, the equipment advertised, the reported loss, the payment rail, the dates, and a narrative of the mechanics. Where a buyer is credited it is by first name or initials only.

Personal information about the buyer — contact details, exact address, employer, and full account or card numbers — is removed before publication. Where a wire receipt, invoice, or message thread is reproduced, identifying details in it are masked.

Reports also process information about the people running reported operations. This is limited to what the public-interest purpose requires: trading identities, domains, publicly filed business and dealer licence records, DOT and MC register entries, the lot or office addresses advertised, the payment destinations used to receive deposits, and the contact details the operation itself published or used to approach buyers. Home addresses and family details of individuals are not published.

We use privacy-respecting aggregate analytics to see which seller reports are being found and to detect bulk scraping. There are no advertising trackers and no audience data is sold. Our hosting provider retains standard server logs, including IP addresses, for a limited period for security and abuse prevention.

The site functions without advertising or tracking cookies. Any cookie set is strictly functional, such as remembering an interface preference.

Published reports are retained indefinitely, because their entire value is that they remain findable years later when the same phone number, bank beneficiary, or set of listing photographs resurfaces under a new dealership name. Unpublished submissions, correspondence, and evidence files are retained while a record remains open and for a reasonable period afterwards to support law enforcement requests.

Send requests to reports@equipmentscamreport.com, from the address you originally wrote from where possible.

• You can ask what we hold about you, ask for your name to be removed from a published report, or ask for your contact details to be deleted from our records.
• You can withdraw a report before publication and it will not be published.
• We cannot always unpublish the underlying factual record of a documented fraud, because that record concerns the reported seller rather than you — but your role in it can be fully anonymised.

Submissions are transmitted over encrypted connections and evidence files are stored with restricted access. No system is perfect, so please never send full account numbers, government identity numbers, or passwords. They are never needed here, and any request for them is itself a scam.

This site is intended for adults and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect their information.

Material changes to this policy are reflected in the date shown at the top of this page. Continued use of the site after a change indicates acceptance of the updated policy.