The Stolen Dealership Story: One Dealer’s Journey to Reclaim Their Online Identity

I’m sure that many of you have been told that you have a doppleganger… someone out in the world that looks and acts like you. In most cases this is a source of humor, but in the case of one dealer of ours, it was nothing but a real pain in the “a double squiggle”.

First, A Little Background…

I’ve been in the car business for 25+ years. I ran a start up in the early “oughts”, sold it in 2005, worked for years consulting and then with a large vendor, and now run SurgeMetrix, where we provide website solutions, AI driven SEO, marketing intelligence data, and Hispanic marketing. Not surprisingly, I know a lot of dealers, and the dealer whose story I’m about to tell is a straight shooter. He takes pride in being honest with his customers, and has more years in the car business than me. His name is Stuart Landsverk, and he owns Arizona Car Sales in Mesa, AZ.

Stuart broached the subject with me because I’ve known him for 4 years as one of his vendors, and because he knows that I run a small cybersecurity training and services company, called AntiguaRecon, here where I live in the Caribbean. My team did much of the open source intelligence (OSINT) research that will be outlined below. We did the research for Stuart because he is a great guy, and shouldn’t have to deal with BS like this. Little did I know that mimicking car dealer websites is a new trend for criminals…

The Website

About 3 weeks ago a person walked into Stuart’s dealership stating that they were there to pick up their car. They claimed that they had flown all the way from Mongolia to get their vehicle.

After talking with the individual, Stuart discovered that the victim had purchased the car via a website called AZDealership.com, and found him via the address on the site. Understandably, Stuart was a bit confused, and the victim was less than happy.

At first glance, the URLs and the websites are quite different. Arizona.cars is a typical, professionally constructed site. Everything works, the information is accurate, and the site is well maintained.

Politely put, the AZDealership.com website is less than perfect. The home page looks reasonable, but when you dig into the website, you find unedited templated content, stock photos, and even name assignments that are hilariously wrong… such as a woman’s name for a man in the “Our Team” section. It’s an amateur production, but it tricked at least one person we know of…

When it came to our quick analysis of the website, we took the following steps:

• URL Research - Covered the primary URL and a secondary URL discovered during our research.
• Review of the AZDealership.com Website - We looked for copyright and trademark infringement information, or anything else that could serve as evidence that the website is mimicking the arizona.cars website.
• Outline Steps for Removing a Phishing Website - So that we could help Stuart avoid wasting time, we identified what Stuart would need to do to file a complaint with Google and Microsoft.

Step 1: URL Research

For the URL research, we looked at two domains: AZDealership.com and arizona-dealership.com.

AZDealership.com

1. Created on namecheap.com on 12/24/22.
2. The contact details are redacted and protected by Withheld for Privacy ehf (an Iceland-based privacy service). If the site claims to be a U.S. dealership, the Icelandic privacy service tends to argue otherwise.

arizona-dealership.com

1. Created 4/2/2020 via namecheap.com), and like the URL above, it too uses the Iceland-based privacy service. However, the URL expired just recently on 4/2/2025. It is common for fake websites to use URLs that last for only a short period of time.
2. Discovered on the Facebook page, with the link provided in the footer of the AZDealership website. Most of the images on the Facebook page have this watermark. All other social media links on the AZD site link back to the AZDealership website. Effectively, they are dead and probably just provided as part of the website template that the attackers were using.

Step 2: The Review of the AZDealership.com Website

We found a sufficient amount of information that shows that the site is attempting to partially mimic Arizona.cars. Here are just a few examples:

The Home Page and Phone Number

In one section of the home page, you see the following text that includes a reference to “Arizona Car Sales”. They do this throughout the website to tie the legitimate site to the mimic.

The phone number used for both websites does not work, or at least did not work the 7 times it was called by multiple individuals. Our goal was to reach someone and then claim that we were sitting outside Arizona Car Sales confused as to why the name on the building was different from the header on the website. That call would have been fun, but also, I had no such luck.

The Footer

Head down to the footer and you will see the business address for Arizona Car Sales. No other dealership is at that address.

About Us

Finally, if you pull up the About Us page, you’ll see the content repeatedly refer to their company name as “Arizona Car Sales”. In this example, it is referenced in the Mission Statement.

There are more examples, but you get the point. The designers of this website are trying to trick people into buying cars from them, while partially faking a real dealership’s information.

Our Team

Finally, I had to add this section to give anyone reading this article a quick chuckle. Pull up the Our Team page and you see 4 stock photographs, the most entertaining being “Melissa Doe”, who appears to be a middle aged male of Indian heritage. A quick Google Lens search of the photo proves that “Melissa” is a stock image. For a laugh, we traced two of the links that Google Lens provided, and it appears that this fake Melissa is quite talented since she also works for a global real estate company and a law firm! For some reason she uses different names for those other two jobs.😉

Step 3: Steps for Removing a Phishing Website

Not surprisingly, the process for removing a fake site from Google, or a fake page from Facebook, is convoluted and difficult. This article by Red Points, a company that specializes in brand protection, uses its software platform to remove counterfeit or impersonation websites. Here are 4 steps Red Points recommends that you follow if you want to remove a fake site:

1. Investigate the Website URL: Research the URL via whois.com and ICANN’s lookup tool to collect when the URL was filed, and who owns it (if they make the mistake of leaving their contact information public).
2. Collect Evidence of the Impersonation: Review the website, like the AntiguaRecon team did, to collect information such as the website’s name, IP addresses, connected websites, brand elements that may violate copyright/trademark policies, pages that are similar to the copied site, and proof of fraudulent activities (such as the individual that walked in the door of Arizona Car Sales to claim the car they “bought” online.
3. Report the Fake Website Information to Google, etc.: This is the messy part of the process because it can take a long time to get a response. That said, the report should provide all the evidence you collected on the website, and associated sites and social media outlets (if applicable). For Google, you can file your report to Google’s Safe Browsing Team or via Microsoft’s “Report an Unsafe Website” form. Just follow the steps. You can also:
   1. Report the domain to their domain registrar, in this case, namecheap.com’s abuse page will need to be consulted.
   2. File an ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) complaint. This step can be a bit of a pain, and can cost some money, but if the domain name is very close to yours, it is worth it. Winning the case can result in the domain being transferred to your ownership. ICANN is the big dog nonprofit organization “that coordinates the global Internet's system of unique identifiers”.
   3. File complaints with the website’s payment gateway such as Paypal and others. You’ll need to dig into the sales process to identify the information and add it to your report. Remember: Evidence is critical, so go get it!
4. Send a Cease and Desist Letter: Sending a letter to the perpetrators won’t do much so you would have to pursue a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice. Do this after you have exhausted the other options. If you take this option, then here’s information on how to file a letter courtesy of Red Points.

You will have to pursue and follow-up with the steps outlined in #3 above. Often, one filing doesn’t work so persistence is important. Remember: An investment of an hour here or there is critical for protecting your trademarks, copyrights, and business reputation.

Fake Websites are Here to Stay

This project was not without its surprises, with this section leading to why I wrote this article.

We’re not in Kansas anymore. In the first half of 2024, the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) discovered almost 3 million new phishing websites. These fake sites can be fake shopping websites like AZDealership.com, designed to steal private information, or infect your computer with malware.

The stats get more personal to the auto industry. Here’s a quote from a warning issued by the Wisconsin DMV back in late February: “An individual creates a website or a social media profile claiming to be a Wisconsin dealership. Stock images or photos of real vehicles and real Wisconsin dealerships are included to make the website seem legitimate. However, there is nothing legitimate about it. The advertised vehicles may be listed at below market value causing interested consumers to take the bait.” This release was picked up by news stations from around the US.

That’s pretty close to what Stuart experienced, what do you think? What’s the goal? It’s obvious: to make money.

Dig a little deeper and you have other reports such as one published last January in the Maquoketa Sentinel-Press in Iowa, or another one posted by WKRN in Nashville, TN. The first article talks about a very aggressive fake site that mimicked a local dealership causing the dealership to get calls from across the country. The second story discusses why the Tennessee Attorney General issued a warning about fake car dealer websites back in November of 2024. Same stories, different settings.

Finally, Frank McKenna, the Co-Founder of Point Predictive, a firm that uses AI to solve loan fraud cases, wrote an article last week arguing that fake car dealer websites are now “scamming millions”. His article cites the Wisconsin DMV post and then provides examples that are very similar to what Stuart experienced.

The Moral of the Story

The sad thing is these websites are just another version of an old con. They are designed to trick people into forfeiting their money at the expense of themselves and the dealer that’s getting mimicked.

But as you see from above, you are not helpless. You can fight back if your website has been copied, but you should also do a little leg work of your own whether via a service such as that provided by Red Points or Allure Security, or via simple OSINT research on your dealership. Here’s a few things you can try if you use the OSINT option:

1. Google Search: Take a moment to Google “cars for sale near me”, a variation of the search with your city name and state instead of “near me”, or even a search of your dealership’s name. Another thing that you can do is grab a small 10-20 word quote from your website and Google it within quote marks “”.
2. Facebook Search: Do a similar search of your name, or variations of your name.
3. Do a Domain Search: Use whois.com or icann.org to look up variations of your domain name. Visit sites that pique your interest.
4. Google Alerts: Make Google work for you. Grab snippets of content off your website, blog titles, and the like and set up Google Alerts to monitor them for you. Look what pops up and adjust over time. It will be like you have your own security research keeping watch for you.

Do all of these things to see what pops up, and respond accordingly. You will need to be persistent. In Stuart’s case, it’s been 3 weeks now with no action by Google and Facebook, but Stuart is not going to give up. Do what Stuart is doing… When it comes to defending your brand, your reputation, and your customers, the time spent defending your dealership is well worth it!