Moving scams are rampant across Florida. But a new law that took effect this month aims to change that.
Nearly half of all moving scam-related complaints submitted to the Federal Department of Transportation in 2023 came out of Florida. The agency dubbed the state as the No. 1 in the country at risk of moving fraud that same year.
The new state law targets one kind of scam specifically: moving brokers.
Sponsored by Sen. Ed Hooper, R-Palm Harbor, the law prevents brokers from presenting themselves as moving companies and providing inaccurate estimates to customers. It requires all documents to be prepared by a moving company registered with the state, and for any estimate given to a customer to be signed as binding by that moving company. The bills passed unanimously in the Florida House and Senate and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it into law. The law officially took effect July 1.
“What we’ve determined to be moving brokers are not actually movers, but just people that found a way to game the system,” Hooper said. “And it struck me as well, that’s not fair.”
A typical victim of a broker scam will search for a moving company online, said Gloria Pugh, CEO of AMWAT Moving Warehousing Storage, which is headquartered in Tallahassee. The website they stumble across happens to be a moving broker that indirectly advertises itself as a moving company. The broker might ask the victim to provide a list of their inventory, and then the broker will send them an estimate of how much it will cost to move it — often low enough to be enticing, Pugh said. The victim generally agrees to pay upfront.
What the victim doesn’t know is that they’ve paid the broker just to find an actual moving company, not to move their goods. The real moving company shows up, and then after all of the person’s goods have been loaded into the truck, the company asks for the actual moving fee, to the victim’s chagrin, Pugh said.
Pugh receives dozens of calls a year complaining about broker scams, she said.
“It was making our industry look horrible,” said Pugh, who is also the president of the Professional Movers Association of Florida. “I was getting very frustrated with the situation. And so I reviewed the law for the state of Florida, and I just thought that there’s ample room here to revise the statute.”
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