Terms of use

By accessing Equipment Scam Report you agree to these terms of use. If you do not agree with them, do not use the site. These terms may be revised at any time, and continued use after a revision constitutes acceptance of the revised version.

Equipment Scam Report is a public-interest consumer information service covering the equipment trade. It publishes reports on sellers of farm machinery, construction equipment, RVs, trucks, trailers, and classic cars — cloned dealership websites, phantom listings, stolen photography, fake escrow and transport brokers, invented dealer licences and DOT numbers, title and VIN problems, and deposits taken on machines that do not exist. Each report sets out the verdict, the records relied on, and the reasoning behind it.

We are not a law enforcement agency, a licensed investigator, a law firm, a dealer licensing board, a credit reporting agency, a consumer reporting agency under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, an equipment appraiser, or a fund recovery service. Nothing published here is legal, financial, or investigative advice, and no report is a substitute for your own inspection of a machine.

Reports combine statements of verifiable fact with opinions and conclusions drawn from those facts. Statements about domain registration dates, hosting and certificate records, secretary of state filings, dealer licence and DOT or MC register entries, bank beneficiary names, lot addresses and the imagery of them, and the original source of listing photography are presented as factual and are sourced.

The verdict itself, and characterisations such as confirmed fraud or high risk, are opinion based on the disclosed evidence, offered as fair comment on a matter of consumer protection. Buyer accounts are published as the statements of the individuals who made them and are identified as such. Reasonable steps are taken to verify them, but no third party can independently confirm every element of a private equipment transaction.

This site is provided on an as-is and as-available basis without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any warranty of accuracy, completeness, merchantability, or fitness for a particular purpose.

The absence of a dealer name, website, or phone number from this site is not an endorsement, a clearance, or any indication that a seller is legitimate. Most fraudulent sellers are never reported to anyone, and a site registered last week is by definition undocumented. Conversely, dealerships and domains change hands, yards are sold, and a report may describe conduct by a previous operator rather than the current one.

You alone are responsible for decisions about buying, financing, transporting, or sending a deposit on any machine. Use this site as one input among several, run the checks set out in the verification guide, and inspect or have the unit inspected before any payment leaves your account.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Equipment Scam Report, its operators, and its contributors are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of money, profits, equipment, data, or goodwill, arising from your use of or reliance on this site or anything published on it.

When you submit a report, evidence, or correspondence, you confirm that your account is truthful to the best of your knowledge, that you have the right to share any material you send, and that you are not submitting anything in order to damage a competing dealer, settle a warranty argument, or advance an unrelated commercial dispute.

You grant a non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free licence to publish, edit for length and clarity, and archive the substance of your submission. Published accounts carry a first name or initials only and never your contact details. Knowingly false reports are removed and may be referred to the relevant authorities.

• Do not scrape, bulk-download, mirror, or resell this archive. Journalists, investigators, auction houses, and agencies should make contact instead.
• Do not use this site to threaten, identify, or harass any person named in a report, or their family, employees, or associates, and do not turn up at a residential address.
• Do not attempt to interfere with, probe, or overload the site or its infrastructure.
• Do not misrepresent yourself as affiliated with this site, and never solicit people who lost deposits through it.

Report text, analysis, and site design are copyrighted work. Short quotations with a link back are permitted for reporting and commentary. Third-party marks, dealership logos, listing photographs, and screenshots appear solely for identification and evidentiary purposes, remain the property of their owners, and their appearance in a report implies no affiliation or endorsement — in most cases their presence is the point, because the seller was impersonating that dealership or had taken those photographs from it.

If you are named in a report and believe it contains an error, begin with documentation rather than a legal threat. A dated walk-around video of the machine, a matching bill of sale, a title, or a licence record in your own legal name resolves most disputes in a day. The corrections policy sets out exactly what is required and how quickly it is acted on. Outcomes are published on the report itself with a dated note; corrections are never applied silently.

Reports link to registrars, state business registers, dealer licensing boards, the federal carrier register, auction results, VIN and title databases, court records, and news coverage. Those sites are outside our control and we are not responsible for their content or availability.

These terms are governed by the laws of the jurisdiction in which the site operator resides, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. If any provision is found unenforceable, the remainder stays in effect.