TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — Two Florida small business owners have found themselves the victim in a mysterious scheme involving a TikTok shop.
Lonnie and Ashley Wilson own a barbershop in Brooksville, 50 miles north of Tampa, called The Barbarian Barber.
The Wilsons have an LLC for their business, LonAsh, LLC, and recently an unknown entity used that information and their address to set up a shop on TikTok. The scam shop, named “Jonathan Thomas Shop,” was alleging to sell women’s clothing and accessories.
The couple had no idea until they started receiving boxes at their front door: customer returns. The address labels beared the name of the scam shop, in addition to the Wilson’s address and a fake phone number.
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When they went to the TikTok shop, they discovered their LLC was listed as the owner, along with their home address.
“My heart dropped because I was like, ‘I don’t know if they’ve opened a line of credit in my name,” Lonnie said. “I don’t know if that’s going to affect my taxes or what. I felt kind of, like, violated a little bit because I was like, ‘Dude, we built this… who are you to take it?”
Ashley said she’d tried unsuccessfully for months to reach TikTok to shut it down. TikTok’s website was also unhelpful. She also said when she reported the issue, she received an email saying it’d been resolved. But it wasn’t.
The Wilsons also called law enforcement but that went nowhere as well.
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“You can’t contact them, you can’t do anything,” Ashley said. “How are we supposed to defend ourselves against this huge company that you can’t contact?”
The Wilsons called NewsNation local affiliate WFLA for help, and Consumer Investigator Shannon Behnken was able to reach TikTok. Less than 24 hours later, a TikTok spokesperson emailed Behnken to say they shut down the imposter site.
A spokesperson for the Better Business Bureau said this is a known type of “imposter business scam.”
Experts said the motivation of this type of scheme is to avoid accountability and business taxes. And that’s what worries the Wilsons. They say they’re now reaching out to the IRS to alert them of this scheme, so they aren’t held responsible for someone else’s taxes.
