A UK rental company hired to a regular client who were doing a last minute job for a client they believed to be Suzuki.
This is the info from the client:
We were contacted by someone called Jay who said he was from Suzuki. He had a real email address from suzuki-international.com, and a real-looking linkedin.
They were looking for a last minute interview film because another company had dropped out.
We had several meetings over the last couple of days, signed a contract and turned up to their specified hired location. They had specific kit requirements (four FX6s, nice lights, good lenses, lots of radio mics). They went as far as specifying frame rate, s-log etc. Everything was rushed but we didn’t sense that there was any issue with any of the demands. The payment terms were a little odd but we’ve had worse – they said that they only pay after the work has been done, but would not expect us to deliver any footage before then.
The shoot was to happen in an airbnb in Gloucestershire. It was meant to be for a well-known person who was part of F1. All along the people from Suzuki were very insistent that they needed an NDA from all of our crew, and that we weren’t allowed to be in the room with the talent or the new tech they’d be talking about until we’d signed the NDA.
We got there and set up as instructed – they’d given us detailed instructions and even left marks for the cameras on the floor. Then they rang to say that they were running late and we got a call to say that to sign the NDA we’d have to go to meet them off site while the talent and the HMU arrived and got ready without us.
At this point our producer had the common sense to say that they wouldn’t leave the kit and that they could wait in the van for the NDA to come to us. Within minutes we had an email saying the shoot was called off. The phone’s now dead. We’ve since called Suzuki and found that they’d never heard of the people we’d been talking to. It looks like it was all a ruse to get us to leave cameras in a remote location so they could nick them?
Note from Xhire – suzuki-international.com is not in fact a real Suzuki domain so Jay didn’t have a real Suzuki email address – it was registered on 23rd April 2025 with Godaddy and has been set to forward to the real Suzuki website. It’s obviously not uncommon for large corporations to have a myriad of domains for different purposes but it’s always worth checking the whois info for a domain.
Domain Name: suzuki-international.com
Registry Domain ID: 2977654947_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.godaddy.com
Registrar URL: https://www.godaddy.com
Updated Date: 2025-04-23T13:45:28Z
Creation Date: 2025-04-23T13:45:28Z
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2026-04-23T13:45:28Z
Registrar: GoDaddy.com, LLC
This was a clever and well planned crime which was thankfully averted due to the producer having their wits about them and not bowing to pressure.
