non existent towing companies

[Melville]

Is anyone else experiencing a flood of towing companies when you google search "towing near me" ? I am in a small town in Ohio, and I know all the players in my county, most on a first name basis. But when I do this search I am getting ads/listings for  "Buds Towing or Howards Towing or Premier, whose addresses are either non existent or at an apartment complex, but no wreckers or rollbacks around ( or seen, small town) Their phone numbers may or may not be local and are indeed answered and dispatchers try to separate the customer from the credit card. If the reviews are to be believed, sometimes the service is provided, but long arrivals and large charges are the complaints.

Is this the next step in internet  3rd party towing, remote call center gets paid then tries to local tower to do call at lowest price and if unsuccessful just ignores customer. 

[doingitall]

Your last sentence just described every motor club that has ever existed. So I do not think this is "the next step". What you are seeing is definitely a scam system, and I think we all see it, some more than others. I am in a rural area, and I sometimes see towing operators from 60+ miles away doing a variety of towing type tasks. I assume this is why those companies are in the area, but no way they are making any money most of the time ... We all know the type of operators I am talking about ...

[Melville]

I tried to look into these companies and meet dead end, I assume they are middlemen and/ or are dummy companies.

[STO]

Check this out:

 

[Melville]

EXACTLY RIGHT !!

[Stubborn66]

On 1/10/2024 at 5:43 PM, doingitall said:

I am in a rural area, and I sometimes see towing operators from 60+ miles away doing a variety of towing type tasks. I assume this is why those companies are in the area, but no way they are making any money most of the time ... We all know the type of operators I am talking about ...

We are rural as well, one of the insurance companies got a tow company from 60+ miles away to send a truck to my closest city and run calls.  They had one or two trucks covering from about 8am to 8pm.  When this started the company had two older trucks that I had seen, shortly after, I started to see pretty new trucks.  I did a bit of snooping online and found that this company had changed it's name more than once, had horrible reviews, and was looking for help advertising making big money on commission.   My calls from the company went down, naturally, for about a year, now the calls are back on the rise and I don't see those trucks as much.  Seems there will be a never-ending cycle of this type of "company"

[Melville]

There will always be the ones that will undercut and you are right there seems to be an infinite supply of them, but there seems to be  a new trend  that  tries to pretend they are  a local provider when actually they are in other states or countries.