The scam playbook:
the moves, and the documented cases behind them

The vendor-defense hub — the map one level up from this page — lays the con out as seven moves. One machine, seven plays. This page is the case file behind that map: the documented cases owners have put on the record, so when something is happening to you, you can match it to a real case and know you're not imagining it. If a move here sounds exactly like your month, you're looking at a pattern, not bad luck.

Straight talk about names, because you came looking for them. Where a company is already in a public file — a federal enforcement action, a court docket — the name is printed here, with the citation, so you can open it and see for yourself whether you are reading a finding or an allegation. Where a case is one owner's documented account, the company stays "one owner's vendor." So match the move, not the logo: these outfits rename, rebrand, and resell the same plays, and a company that isn't on this page is not a company that's clean.

Each move below links to the page that actually helps you fight it. This page is the recognition; those pages are the response. And if you're brand new, with no site or listing anyone could hold hostage yet — read it anyway. This is the vaccination, and it's cheapest before you own anything they can take.

The cancellation trap

You try to leave and the contract fires an instant penalty. The cleanest documented case — an owner charged thousands the moment he hung up, a third of his remaining contract taken instantly — is walked through on the proposal-reading page, because the trap is written into the paper before you sign.

What helps: reading the proposal before you sign, leaving clean when you're out, fighting the bill for money already taken.

Reading a proposal Leaving clean Fighting the bill

Hostage assets

The vendor holds the thing you paid for — the website, the domain, the phone number, the Google listing — so leaving means losing it.

Another vendor took over an owner's phone number and became his answering service without telling him, then refused him access to his own Google listing and stranded forty-three five-star reviews behind a login he didn't control. A federal court file preserves the platform version of this in public: in Cruz v. Townsquare Media, an owner's complaint quotes the vendor saying it runs on a "proprietary platform," that cancelling meant he would have to "rebuild [his] website elsewhere," and that he had no access to his own domain.

Read that straight. Those are allegations, not findings — the order says every email in it is "drawn from the allegations within the Complaint," and in July 2025 the judge granted the motion to dismiss with leave to amend. What you can use tonight is the wording. Search your own contract for "proprietary platform" and read the ownership terms around it. The proposal page is where that gets caught before you sign.

What helps: the ownership control test, getting a hostage domain back, and Chapter Zero for locked accounts.

The control test Hostage domain Locked accounts

Recycled and junk leads

You pay per lead, and the leads are sold to a stack of contractors at once, or aren't real. The FTC ordered HomeAdvisor to pay up to $7.2 million over how it marketed those leads, and in November 2023 the agency announced it had returned more than $3 million to businesses that had paid for HomeAdvisor memberships. When a lead lands dead, the policy is where you find out what it's worth: Angi's posted lead-credit guidelines, as published in July 2026, list "Consumer is not calling you back" and "You did not win the job" among the situations "accounted for in our lead pricing and therefore not eligible for lead credits." A darker variant: one owner documented his vendor cloaking his own phone number, intercepting the organic leads that were already his, and reselling them back to him and his competitors.

Do not read those refunds as a door for you. The FTC's own report site says it cannot resolve an individual report, and money like that goes out later, off a claims list, on the agency's clock. File anyway. Then work your own money at the card and the contract, on fighting the bill.

What helps: knowing what a lead actually costs, and owning your own number so it can't be cloaked.

The price map Own your number The Angi policy

Report theater

The monthly report glows while the phone stays quiet. One owner watched a report show clicks and impressions "way up" while his calls and form-fills were, in his words, abysmal. Another owner's site was never listed in Google at all and had no visitor tracking installed, so no report from that vendor could show it failing.

What helps: reading the monthly report, and the 20-minute self-inspection to count what customers actually touch.

Reading the report The self-inspection

The script versus the contract

What the salesman says out loud and what the paper says are two different deals. One owner was told the engagement was month-to-month, paid over four thousand dollars to start, and found himself inside a twelve-month term that cost him twenty-six thousand dollars. The pitch isn't what gets enforced. The paper is.

One owner's verdict, worth carrying: "If a service is good, they wouldn't need to have a policy like that."

What helps: reading the proposal line by line, and the five questions that get the real terms in writing.

Reading a proposal The five questions

The acquisition machine

Once you're big enough, the pitch changes from "let us market you" to "let us buy you" — the private-equity roll-up that consolidates independent shops, sometimes keeping the local names. That's a whole economy, and it has its own page.

The wolves

Astroturf and fake peers

When owners started warning each other online, some vendors followed them there. That poisons the exact place you'd go to check a vendor out.

What helps: the two-minute source check on a "peer," and a real background check before you sign.

Spotting the planted peer Background-check a vendor

None of this is new

If it feels ancient, it is. Long before SEO, the Yellow Pages ran the same animal: one owner watched them sell him the big ad, then turn around and call his competitor to sell them a bigger ad to beat it. Same move, new costume. The technology changes, the plays don't. Name the move and you'll recognize it in whatever form it wears next.

Recognized your situation above? Follow the "what helps" link under it. For the whole machine on one page, start at the con, mapped. To stop being the target in the first place, the five questions is the filter every vendor has to pass.