By Ben Thorpe – Equipment World – December 3, 2024
A small Tennessee forklift dealer was impersonated by online scammers through a fake website, according to the Tennessee attorney general. The dealer says the scheme tried to rob people of thousands of dollars in down payments for nonexistent construction equipment.
Steven Benson, who has owned Equipment Express in Lebanon, Tennessee, since 2006, told Equipment World he never had a website for his dealership, and scammers made a fraudulent site to impersonate him in early October. After several calls from random customers looking for machines he doesn’t sell, including skid steers, tractors and dump trucks, he received a call from a man who had wired a down payment to the scammers, thinking Benson had received it.
“At this point, I kind of caught on to what was going on,” Benson says. “He gave me the information to the website, and I immediately Googled it and brought it up. And sure enough, it was Equipment Express, with my physical address, different phone number, advertising all kinds of equipment. It was a nice website. It’s very realistic.
“So, he [the scammed customer] also had some questions about how real this company might be. And they even sent him a copy of their business license, which I later found out was fraudulent. It was made up. They did a really good job at posing as my company.”