Catching out the Fraudsters

It is highly unfortunate that fraud is still prevalent in our industry. Many plant hire companies have been the target of sophisticated fraudsters who often take advantage of the fact that hire desks are often manically busy in the hope that they might be able to sneak through the usual checks. Fraud scenarios include hiring equipment and not returning it, arson and even theft claims for items which do not exist, or which are owned by another party.

Fraudsters often set up bogus companies in order to hire equipment from plant hirers and a typical scenario could involve a so-called contractor ringing up to request some equipment. A whole web of lies may be spun such as the contractor saying he’s not local and has secured some work in the area. The first hire may go without incident and payment is successfully made with a credit card. On the second hire, he may need several more items of equipment and an account is set up so he is invoiced on account. It is only when the equipment isn’t returned or the invoice isn’t paid that the plant hirer realises that they have been duped. Often high value plant items are targeted to order and shipped out of the country to sell on in the used equipment market.

At AMI Group, we offer a range of tracking devices which give plant hirers superb protection in the event of plant theft. Even if plant machinery is stolen, the AMI tracking devices allow plant hirers to quickly pinpoint the location of the equipment to the nearest metre and enable its recovery – saving the plant hirer thousands of pounds and avoiding the hassle and inconvenience of replacing stolen kit. A small investment can pay dividends, as the money spent on increasing security measures can be quickly recovered through insurance discounts, reduced claims and less downtime.

Virtually on a daily basis we are helping AMI Group customers across the UK to locate and recover stolen equipment as a result of the use of state-of-the-art tracking devices which utilise GPS (Global Positioning System), GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) and RF (Radio Frequency) technology. Once an AMI tracking device is fitted to a piece of machinery, customers can logon to the AMI Nexis web-based portal to establish its exact destination.

Don’t become a victim of plant fraud, contact AMI Group today.