JACKSONVILLE, Fl – Scammers are trying to silence the Better Business Bureau by attacking its online website used by visitors to research companies.
The con artists do not want you to see BBB warnings about three companies created by scammers to trick customers into buying an RV or trucking equipment.
The businesses are Harrison RV, an RV dealer in Iowa, and two Alabama trucking companies, Alabama Truck and Equipment and AL Truck LLC.
“All three businesses have been out actually of business for years, but the scammers built fake websites and stole their name and their identity,” explained Tom Stephens, President and CEO of the Better Business Bureau serving Northeast Florida and the Southeast Atlantic.
During the last 12 months, customers have lost between $6-7 million in deposits sent to these companies for RVs or equipment they never received.
Last week, Stephens said a man from Alaska sent a $55,000 deposit to one of the trucking companies to purchase heavy equipment. The scammers came up with excuse after excuse and finally stopped communicating with him altogether.
The Better Business Bureau discovered the scam and posted warnings about the companies on its website. The scammers then attacked bbb.org to try to shut it down to prevent customers from learning about the scam.
“They use a network of hijacked computers to send requests for information on those three companies to our website. They just flooded our website with requests,” Stephens explained. The sheer number of requests overwhelmed the website causing it to crash twice last week for a few minutes.
On Oct 10, the day of one of the cyberattacks, within a 5-hour period Stephens said BBB blocked 130 million requests. For perspective, he said in the last 12 months, during a 5-hour period the most traffic that BBB.org had to block was 1 million requests.
More than 7 million requests were sent about the three companies being used by scammers to steal customer money.
BBB.org is back up and running. The Better Business Bureau is warning consumers, though, so they do not fall for the rouse.
Stephens recommends you take these steps before you pay or hire a company to do work:
- Search the company name on BBB.org
- Type the company name and the word ‘scam’ into Google or Bing to see if anything negative pops up
- Confirm the company’s address exists, by searching U.S. Postal Service Zip Code Look Up
- Search WHOIS and the company name to check the history of the website’s domain
“If they say they’ve been in business for 10 years, but the website’s been up two weeks, that’s probably a tip off that it’s not legitimate,” warned Stephens.