The FTC issued a warning this week, and it’s something I have been chasing down for over a year. Scammers are spoofing Car, Tractor, RV, and Heavy Equipment dealerships to steal millions in wire transfers from victims.
I have been tracing this scheme for 18 months and have cataloged more than 1,300 of these spoofed dealer websites.
The problem is so bad that Matt Vega and I have established a task force to take down the websites, and so far, 600 have been removed.
How Dealer Cloning Works
A dealer clone is a fake website designed to look like the real dealer it is impersonating. A buyer finds a tractor, a classic Mustang, or a used truck priced below market, wires a deposit or the full amount, and the vehicle never arrives.
The easiest targets are small, established dealers with no website of their own. The scammers exploit the real dealer’s history to make their scam more believable.
Here is an example of a fake dealer clone.
It’s Grown From Five Sites To More Than 1,300
When I started to research these dealer clones a little over a year ago, I had 5 sites. By June of this year, it had passed 200, and now, just a few short months later, the list is over 1,300 dealer-cloned sites.
The chart below shows the climb. Part of that rise is due to new sites going up, and part is due to simply getting better at finding them.
I am currently finding 5-10 sites a day.
Losses Total $12.4 Million, But That Underestimates It
There are no industry losses to the problem, so I had to find each reported case and track it in a spreadsheet.
So far, I have found $12.4 million in reported losses from victims. But honestly, this is just a small fraction of the real losses.
The losses on these dealer-cloned sites involve heavy equipment, tractors, classic muscle cars, and even RV’s.
The largest single documented fraud case that I could find was perpetrated by a scammer using the dealer Daves Used Auto Sales.
A victim named Jeffrey Chu documented a 389,000 loss from a wire transfer he sent to have a Porsche delivered, which never arrived.
Where The Dealer Clones Are Located
I also mapped where these fake dealers claim to be located. By raw count, Alabama, Texas, California, and Florida lead the country.
Adjust for population, and a different pattern appears. The fraud occurs most often in rural farm and ranch states, the places least likely to make national news.
Wyoming And Montana Are States Hit Harder Than Any Other
Wyoming and Montana are targeted nearly 9 times as hard as the national rate.
Idaho, Alabama, North Dakota, Nebraska, Arkansas, and Kansas rank the worst per capita because that is where the tractor and equipment dealers these crews love to impersonate actually operate.
We Started A Dealer Cloning Task Force
Matt Vega and I built a task force to push back. The work is slow, methodical, and never finished.
For each fake site, we document the evidence, archive the pages, and file abuse reports with the domain registrar and the hosting company.
If we can find a fraud loss, we will document that with the registrar as well. We do everything in our power to take them down.
When a registrar sees hard proof of a wire fraud operation, it will often suspend the domain within days.
Our efforts have now knocked more than 600 of these clones offline.
What Buyers Can Do
The websites are the easy part to kill. The bank accounts and shell companies behind them are harder, and that is where the real harm is arranged.
So that is where we are headed next. We keep the takedowns coming to protect buyers today, and we keep building the trail that ties these sites to the people cashing the wires.
If you are buying a vehicle online and the price feels too good, stop and check. Call the dealership using the number the state has on file, never the number printed on the website, because that number is very often the scammer waiting for your call.
All 1,300 Sites Right Here
Here are all the dealer-cloned sites I have identified. People are encouraged to do their own analysis and validate whether a dealer they are working with is legitimate.
