Fake dealer websites selling non-existent cars, tractors, and heavy equipment are popping up all over the internet, luring victims by the hundreds every month.
I wrote about this scheme last year which has now exploded to hundreds of sites.
The sites look professional. Many impersonate real dealers in small towns, complete with stolen photos, AI-generated staff portraits, and fabricated video testimonials.
Buyers find the listings on Facebook Marketplace or through Google searches. The sellers demand wire transfers or cryptocurrency, claiming the equipment will ship within days.
Once the money clears, the seller stops responding. The equipment never arrives.
This Scheme Is Spreading Like Wildfire with Sites Popping Up Every Day
I have been covering the growing scam since March of 2025, and have now cataloged over 200 different websites run by scammers.
This month, a new website, ScamReported.com, came online and has already reported at least 74 new websites selling tractors, RVs, and vintage cars.
Those 74 sites have reportedly stolen $1,321,502 from victims. This is probably just a small fraction of the total losses, as it relies only on public scam reports. You can see all the losses here.
The average loss from these scams is $17,500, with losses ranging from $4,000 to $53,000 across all the reports.
Over 200 Scam Dealer Websites and Counting
Federal prosecutors and state attorneys have tied the operations to scammers based in Romania, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
When I started cataloging dealer sites a year ago, I had a list of five. That list has ballooned to over 200 now, with 5-10 new websites sprouting up each month.
The Better Business Bureau serving central and southern Alabama reported that buyers in its region had lost $2 million to $3 million in a six-week stretch last summer.
The South Dakota and Tennessee attorneys general have since issued formal warnings, as have sheriffs’ and police departments in Louisiana, Alabama, and Colorado.
Despite the warnings, this scam is only growing.
They Go To Great Lengths Using Artificial Intelligence To Fool Victims
The scammers running this operation rely heavily on templates and artificial intelligence to quickly generate lots of websites.
The websites often contain deepfake images of employees and staff, as well as testimonials by satisfied customers.
In this video, a happy customer stands by his tractor. The lip synching is off, and everything about this looks strange.
In another video testimonial, another satisfied customer just can’t say enough good things about the company they worked with.
Photos taken from a website showing staff members reveal they were likely AI-generated. In this photo, staff members look like clones, and some have extra fingers.
Builder Power Heavy Equipment – The Scammiest Of Them All
One scam site in particular shows how far these Romanian fraudsters will go. The site BuildPowerHeavyEquipment.com goes to great lengths to make itself appear legitimate and trustworthy.
But they are the scammiest of them all.
Their inventory page boasts amazing deals, and they claim to have sold over 45,000 tractors. But when you look further, almost everything is a lie.
Take, for instance, their reviews. They hired Fiverr actors to make fake reviews for them. By reverse image searching the reviews, I was able to locate one reviewer named “Oliver Thompson” who provided a glowing review as a prolific Fiverr spokesperson who will create videos for any company.
If you want to see the fake reviews on their site, I captured them here.
And they don’t stop there. They load their website with tons of fake 5-star reviews from people that don’t exist.
And it gets worse. They actually create fake TrustPilot and Yellow Page review sites that give themselves glowing reviews. All of the reviews are fake because they are spoofing the actual TrustPilot and Yellow Pages.
Check out the TrustPilot spoof here, and the YellowPages spoof here.
And the Yellow Pages spoof is near pixel perfect if you weren’t looking for the clues.
Download The Master List Of Sites
I want to provide the master list of URLs and dealerships to help people avoid getting scammed by these fake dealers.
These list have elements that match suspicious sites so everyone should do their own due diligence with any website on the list.
If you are a victim, report the crime to the FTC, the FBI IC3, and notify your bank that you have been a victim of a scam.
If you find any additional websites and want to notify me, so I can warn other people, feel free to reach out to me on my blog.
