KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Richard Cybulski’s 5 Guys Transportation has been shuttling people to Kansas City’s airport and around town for nearly a decade. But now Cybulski is worried his hard-earned reputation could be ruined by an impostor.
To prove his point, Cybulski typed 5 Guys Transportation into Google.
“I show up second,” he said.
The first site is for Five Guys Shuttle – a company that has copied Cybulski’s website down to the tiniest detail, including using the same Department of Transportation number and the name of one of Five Guys’ original owners.
Even the reviews on the fake site are stolen from Cybulski’s real site.
So how can someone tell the difference between the real site and the fake site? The fake site uses the word Shuttle instead of transportation and has a phone number with a 913 area code. The actual 5 Guys site has the word Transportation in the title and has an 816 area code.
Fox 4 also found that when we called the impostor’s 913 phone number, nobody picked up.
Cybulski said unsuspecting customers are still using the bogus site, but booking online. He knows that because he has received dozens of complaints from people who booked on the bogus site and then either never got a taxi or got bad service.
“I have sent most of these to the attorney general,” Cybulski said.
It’s not just 5 Guys Transportation that is having problems.
Malik Khalid, the owner of Quick Silver Shuttle, said his site is also being spoofed. Khalid showed Fox 4 how, by Googling Quick Silver, the first site to pop up is a competitor’s site which spells Quick as Quik.
The man behind both these fake sites is Nikolas Saylor. That’s the same Nikolas Saylor that Fox 4 Problem Solvers has written about multiple times before. He and his brother Austin had their taxi service shut down after they were accused of operating illegally and charging customers credit cards as many as 10 times for the same trip.
But Saylor tells Fox 4 that he’s an honest businessman now and has done nothing wrong. He said he’s shocked Khalid and Cybulski are upset, and all he’s doing is putting more competition in the market place.
Saylor, however, agreed to make changes to his websites to eliminate the confusion. Fox 4 Problem Solvers has also learned that Saylor’s business practices are under criminal investigation in Kansas. We’ll keep you posted.