A little bit of warning. If you're looking for help for your tractor's equipment machinery out there on the internet, fraud is extremely common. Today I'm going to show you a gentleman that I just saw who had seven scammers after him almost immediately.
The example that I'm showing you here today is coming out of a Facebook group called New Holland Tractors and Equipment. It's about 20,000 people out there that go back and forth sharing their experiences with their machines, helping each other out sometimes with mechanical issues or concerns, or bouncing ideas off of one another whether a new piece of equipment is right for their specific application. Things that we usually help with here on the dealership level, but sometimes crowdsourcing that information from the internet can be helpful. In this case, this gentleman was reaching out looking for a broom for a New Holland MC22. Now what is an MC22? It's one of these.
It's a front mower. It would have been made in about the early 2000s, so it's about 15 to 20 years old at this point. This particular gentleman was looking for a broom attachment to go onto the front of this mower. Now this is truly a needle in a haystack. The attachments for this machine are long discontinued by this point. It was a low-volume model to begin with and the most unusual of attachments. They really sell very few of these particular brooms, so this is a great thing to go to the internet for help with. Us here on the dealership side could do very little in order to be able to solve this customer's need, and so sharing this out in this Facebook group made a lot of sense. Here's how the conversation goes. He throws this need out here on the internet and immediately Frank Mitchell is out here. "Hello, sir, I have one." Barks Morgan, "Have one in my garage. Send me a direct message." Frederick William, "Message me and let's take a look at what I have." [chuckles] Danny Wallace, "Are you looking to get a new one or a used one, sir?" Derek Main, "Still searching? Message me and let's take a look at what I've got." Albert Rose, "Have some used ones available. PM me if still searching." Now, things continue here with some people throwing some actual caution out to this gentleman, seeing what's going on. "Sure are a lot of scammers on here, be careful." Also from the original poster, some of these comments have "direct messaging" me. Some of these people are not just posting in this group, they're sending individual messages to the person who's asking for this broom offering them products. Now, as we go on here, some of these people continue to come back for a second and third time. We hear from Frank Mitchell again coming back and offering his piece a second time. "Have you found anything?"
You can see an absolute deluge of people offering up this piece, which, again, to my estimation, if there's 50 of these things that had been sold in the country, that's probably it, so clearly, all of these people don't have this thing sitting in their garage. The next steps from here are going to look very similar for all of these people running after this particular person. They're all going to try to move the conversation somewhere else. Whether that's going into some kind of messaging, direct messaging platform, asking for an email address, and going over there, they're going to try to take it out of the public forum so that there's not other people noticing that some things might not necessarily add up.
They're also going to do it as quickly as possible because most of the accounts that are being used here to have these conversations are hacked accounts. If you go through and you look at them, these are going to be people that have actual profiles. They're going to have maybe some posting history. They would have been talking to their friends and that kind of stuff before. The profiles themselves can look very legitimate.
They've been hacked and it's probably a matter of time before Facebook or the platform that they're working on figures this out and shuts the accounts down. They're going to try to move you very quickly to some messaging platform or over to email where they've got a direct communication channel with you. Very quickly, they're going to try to get your money, whether it's PayPal, Western Union, writing a check, sending some cash, getting some money over to them, and then you're quickly going to find out that this piece of equipment and what you thought you were buying just simply doesn't exist and any communication will go silent. We're seeing people, gosh, on a near-daily basis. Every other day you're going to see people popping up in some of these forums saying, "Look out for so-and-so.
They've taken my money" because this type of fraud has become so prevalent. The thing to me that's the newest about this is how focused it is. So often fraud on the internet is some broad-based attempt. They're going to go out there, they're going to blast junk into your email box. They're going to blanket as many people as possible and not be as laser focused as what this is. Here you have six, seven people trying to contact one individual person to person like this in order to perpetuate this theft. Obviously, they're being successful or they wouldn't be spending their time to go through this effort. If you need help with your machinery, always make a place like us the first ones to call.
We're here, we're glad to help. There's very legitimate reasons to go out to the internet, to look for help with something like this, that this is a needle in the haystack type issue. We wouldn't be able to help this customer find a broom, but work with those that can validate that you're not dealing with dishonest people. Ask for further pictures, unique things that show that somebody has physical possession of something before taking any further steps.
