01
A dealer name with one letter changed
Established dealer names get copied because buyers recognise them and stop reading there.
← Industries
Heavy equipment & machinery: one score out of 1,000 in about 10 seconds
A machine is found in a listing or a cold email, a deposit holds it, and the balance follows on transport paperwork — often without anyone standing next to the machine.
The buyer or the equipment manager, usually while the listing is still open and someone else is circling it. Paste the email address or the web address, read the reasons, and make the call. The first check needs no account.
Typical wire $15K – $250K · illustrative transaction size, not a loss estimate
What matters here
3 tells that carry the most weight
02
A site that appeared this quarter
A dealership with a real yard has an archived trail. A page put up last month does not.
03
A domain with nothing behind it
No mail records, no history, no traffic — a shell built for one sale.
What a check reads
5 public record types, every time
For a dealer, the near-match name and the archive history together tell you most of it: a real yard has a past, and a copied name has one letter.
How the score is built- Registration date
- When the web address was first registered, and who the registrar is, straight from the domain record.
- Mail setup
- Whether the domain can receive mail at all, and whether it has sender rules that stop other people sending as it.
- Site and archive history
- Whether the site answers today, what it says it is, and how far back an archived copy of it goes.
- Near-match names
- Whether the address is a one-character or one-word variant of a better-known name.
- Free and throwaway inboxes
- Whether a commercial quote arrived from a consumer provider or a disposable inbox.
Before the money leaves
5 steps a score cannot do for you
- 01Call the dealership on the number listed on their own site, and ask for the machine by serial number.
- 02Ask for photos with the serial plate visible, taken today, and a walk-around video.
- 03Refuse to pay a deposit to a personal account, a different company name, or a newly changed bank.
- 04Arrange an inspection or a third-party inspector before the balance moves.
- 05Use a payment method with recourse for the deposit where the seller will allow it.
A worked example
How one of these reads
The situation
An excavator is listed well under market, and the seller's site looks like a familiar dealer.
What the record says
The domain is a one-letter variant of a long-running dealer, registered 11 days ago, with no archived pages.
The reading
Critical band, with the lookalike spelling and the registration date named as the reasons.
Illustrative example built from the record types a check reads — registration dates, mail setup, site history, and near-match names. Not a real vendor.
Questions we get
4 questions, answered straight
How can I tell if an equipment dealer's website is fake?
Paste the web address. The check shows when the domain was registered, whether the site has any archived history, whether its mail is set up, and whether the name is a one-character variant of an established dealer — the four things fake dealer sites cannot fake.
The price is well under market. Is that enough of a warning?
It is a reason to look, not a verdict. Run the check, then confirm the machine by serial number on a call to a number from the dealer's own site before any deposit leaves.
Does a check confirm the machine or the serial number exists?
No. A check reads the public record behind the seller's email address and website. Nothing about the machine itself, its hours, or its title is part of it.
What if the seller only has a Gmail address?
The check flags a commercial quote arriving from a consumer or disposable inbox. It happens with legitimate small sellers too, so it lowers the score rather than settling the question.
What a score does not say
A score reads public records about an email address or a web address. It is an observation, not a guarantee, and it does not tell you whether a specific payment is safe. The manual steps still matter.
Built and run by a named person, not an anonymous site — who is behind this and how the score is built.
Building this into software your industry already uses? For platforms.
Paste the vendor's email address or website. About 10 seconds.
Run a free check