Container con artists have forced legitimate suppliers of cargo boxes to rally together and form a consolidated front against alleged website cloning, intellectual property theft, and brand fraud.
Although still in the early stages, the collaboration between competitors who share bona fide business credentials aims to create awareness about scammers who abuse Google to dupe gullible clients looking for best-price container options. One of the methods mooted thus far is to name and shame bogus box suppliers through email circulation.
Another is using a Facebook page to post weekly updates about the latest news from the scam front.
“It’s the only thing we can do,” said Barron Charsley, director of Speed Space container solutions company. “We’ve gone to the police but they say there’s almost nothing they can do because it’s very difficult to trace.” The fraudsters’ usual modus operandi was almost always the same, said Charsley. “They offer containers at vastly reduced prices compared to market standards.”
Speed Space, for example, offers second hand 20ft containers and 40ft high-cubes for R29 920 and R32 900 respectively. A so-called competitor, ‘Speedy Spaces’, offers prices of R13 500 and R17 500 for the same container options.
“You would imagine that people should know by now that if it’s too good to be true it probably is,” Charsley said. He added that Speedy Spaces, apart from ‘sharing’ a similar brand identity, was also ‘coincidentally’ situated around the corner from Speed Space’s Honeydew premises which is dotted with containers. However, when FTW went calling on Speedy Spaces, Google maps led us to a townhouse complex with not a single cargo box in sight. According to Charsley the scammers have it all figured out.
“If you ask them to view a container, they usually direct you to the container depot in City Deep or Rustenburg and, because clients think ‘seeing is believing’, they easily part with their money, thinking that what they have seen is what they’re going to get. “And when they can’t view the containers themselves, they’re hoodwinked through having pictures of containers emailed to them – content with specs and images usually lifted from the websites of actual suppliers.”
Speed Space has recorded at least one incident where a buyer has asked where his box was, a container for which he had paid around R30 000, only to find out he had been scammed by a cloned website. And over the last year several ‘similar’ sites had been identified, Charsley said. One legitimate competitor of Speed Space is Stella Containers which also has to ‘compete’ with a company that has a similar name, except it's spelt with a single “l” - Stela. And another valid operator, Container Monster, has found a company in the market called Container Monsta. Phone the latter and no one answers the cell number provided.
“It’s almost always the case,” Charsley said. “If you eventually get hold of these guys they talk to you and when they find out you’re onto them their lines go dead.” Some of these ‘companies’ even have ads placed on Google, but seek them out on a street view of Google maps and you’ll find that behind the website there’s nothing.
Asked whether the industry standard of payment up front could be changed, Charsley said because of the prohibitive expense of delivery and related costs involved, it was virtually impossible to come up with a different business model. But Gary Power of Innovative Modular Concepts, one of the companies collaborating against container fraud, has suggested looking into ways of regulation.
In a circular sent out to legitimate operators he wanted to know “how do we protect the industry and our business against the many cowboys and con artists?” Attempts have also been made to alert Google’s attention to the fraudulent use of its platform by apparent web-cloners.
“But they think we’re just trying to discredit other competitors.” In the meantime, warned Charsley, they could only try to encourage clients to be as vigilant as possible by doing their homework.
You would imagine that people should know by now that if it’s too good to be true it probably is. – Barron Charsley
