How Scam Movers Silence Their Critics

The strategy is consistent across multiple documented cases. A moving company accumulates negative reviews and watchdog listings. Rather than improving service, they hire lawyers to sue the watchdog sites, individual reviewers, or consumer advocates. The goal is not to win the lawsuit. It is to make the cost of maintaining negative information higher than the cost of removing it. Most small watchdog sites and individual consumers cannot afford to fight.

This is sometimes called a SLAPP suit (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation). The lawsuit itself is the weapon. Discovery costs, attorney fees, and the stress of litigation are enough to silence most critics, regardless of the merits of the case.

Safe Ship and other movers led by Roger Vance and Aldo DiSorbo sued USMPO (the US Moving Protection Organization) in 2025 seeking to have USMPO remove their listings and ratings. Nationwide Relocation Services, owned by Aldo DiSorbo, similarly targeted MovingScam.com in a 2007 lawsuit. The SafeShip litigation effort was backed by industry actors seeking to reshape the regulatory environment in ways that would reduce accountability for carriers.

In each case, the response to documented consumer harm was litigation against the messenger, not improvement of the service. The pattern is consistent: companies with legitimate fraud complaints invest in legal action to suppress the complaints rather than investing in operational improvements to prevent them.

Some moving contracts include clauses that prohibit customers from posting negative reviews. Trunk flags this practice as a red flag because it signals that the company expects complaints and has preemptively built legal barriers against them. Any mover that requires you to waive your right to post an honest review is telling you something about the experience they expect you to have.

The Consumer Review Fairness Act of 2016 made many of these clauses unenforceable at the federal level. But the clauses persist in contracts because most consumers do not know the law protects them. The chilling effect works even when the clause itself is legally void. A consumer who sees "you agree not to post negative reviews" in their contract is less likely to post, regardless of whether the clause would hold up in court.

Individual review sites and consumer advocates are vulnerable to legal pressure because they depend on editorial judgment that can be challenged as defamatory. Data platforms like Trunk are structurally different. We report verifiable facts: FMCSA registration status, crash records, BBB complaint counts, Google rating distributions, and community sentiment from public forums. These are not opinions. They are documented data points from authoritative sources.

Trunk cross-references eight sources for each of the 4,200+ movers in our database. When we flag a carrier, the flag is based on data: complaint volumes, licensing gaps, chameleon carrier patterns documented through state business filings, rental truck evidence from consumer photos. This makes the litigation playbook less effective because the information we publish is drawn from government databases and publicly available consumer accounts.

If a mover has sued a review site or consumer advocate, that fact alone is informative. It means they chose to spend money on lawyers rather than on improving their service. Check whether a mover has been involved in litigation against review platforms. Search their company name plus "lawsuit" or "defamation."

Be skeptical of any contract that includes a non-disparagement clause. Under the Consumer Review Fairness Act, these clauses are generally unenforceable for consumer contracts. You have the right to post honest reviews about your experience.

And pay attention to review patterns. A mover with hundreds of positive Google reviews but zero negative ones may have had negative reviews removed through legal pressure or platform manipulation. Authentic review profiles include a range of ratings. A perfectly clean review history is itself a red flag.

In 2025, three moving companies filed nearly identical federal lawsuits against USMPO (United States Moving Protection Organization), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that maintains a moving company database and verified carrier network. The plaintiffs, Vellar Holdings LLC (operating as Safe Ship Moving Services), Colonial Van Lines Inc., and AMS Moving Inc. (operating as Amerisafe), were represented by the same counsel and coordinated their filings to maximize the defendant's legal costs. The strategy was stated explicitly in a recorded pre-suit phone call: Roger Vance, owner of Vellar/Safe Ship, told the USMPO founder on August 4, 2024, that he intended to 'spend three or $400,000 and get your little site shut down' and threatened to 'bleed you dry.' The central complaint: the plaintiffs were listed as 'not verified' on usmpo.org, and they claimed this harmed their business. They never identified any specific false statement. The court granted the defendant's first Motion to Dismiss, finding that Colonial Van Lines 'pled nothing more than conclusory facts.' The case remains pending in the Southern District of Florida (consolidated Case No. 25-cv-80042).

The litigation playbook extends beyond platforms to individual consumers and consumer advocates. Following the filing of a Section 14704 complaint against Florida HHG broker Menards Moving and Storage, the broker's compliance department responded not by addressing the underlying $44,966 damages claim, but by sending a cease and desist to the retired lawyer representing the consumer. Menards, like other moving companies, also has a practice of threatening consumers with legal action and disruption of moving services when they post unfavorable reviews. The letter challenged his standing to appear in the proceeding, threatened to report him for unauthorized practice of law, and demanded that all future communication come only from licensed counsel. The lawyer cited FMCSA's own rules of practice (49 CFR 386.4), which explicitly allow 'any person' to appear as a representative in agency proceedings. The broker did not dispute the factual allegations in the complaint. This pattern, attacking the messenger rather than the message, is consistent across the industry. It works against individuals who cannot afford to respond. It works less well against data platforms that report verifiable facts from public records.