Why Searching "McCloskey" Online Almost Cost Me a $340K Mistake

I've been handling procurement for heavy equipment for seven years. I've personally made (and documented) eleven significant purchasing mistakes, totaling roughly $38,000 in wasted budget and delays. Now I maintain our team's checklist so nobody else repeats them. This is the story of the mistake that started it.

In 2023, I needed to verify a used McCloskey J50V2 jaw crusher. Routine. I had a serial number, a dealer quote, and approval to buy. I just wanted a spec sheet that matched what the site foreman had been asking for.

So I searched "McCloskey." Because that's how you look for a thing, right? Just the name.

What came back was a rabbit hole. There was a wedding photographer named Gabriella McCloskey. A fitness coach named Desiree McCloskey. A blog post about Simparica for dogs, written by another McCloskey family member. Something that looked like a gossip piece about a "Lewis wife" rumor. And in the sidebar, a video thumbnail asking, in all caps: "Is Chrisley Alive?"

Not one useful result about McCloskey International, the crushing and screening equipment manufacturer.

I stared at those tabs and thought: Is McCloskey even a real equipment brand? That moment of doubt — that tiny crack — nearly cost us a lot of money.

Why a brand search turns into a rabbit hole

McCloskey is a surname. A real, common Irish surname shared by thousands of real people. One of them photographs weddings for a living. Another one posts fitness content. And in the middle of that noise, a serious construction equipment manufacturer carries the same name.

From the outside, a search engine looks like an honest librarian. The reality is that the first results page is an auction. Algorithms rank what's popular, what's paid, and what's linked-to — not what's true. A wedding photographer's page can absolutely outrank an industrial manufacturer if her SEO is better. That's not a knock on her. It's a comment on how the system works.

Why does this matter? Because equipment buying decisions are based on information. When your information pipeline is full of wedding photos, fitness reels, and dog medication reviews, eventually someone makes a bad call on company money.

But here's the part I don't like admitting: I made it worse. I searched "McCloskey" the way a consumer searches for a coffee shop, instead of "McCloskey J50V2 jaw crusher specs" or "McCloskey dealer." In a procurement role, that's not a small mistake. That's amateur hour.

And the gray market actively exploits that. There are reseller sites that use the official brand name in their page titles, stuff their pages with keywords, and advertise "compatible" parts at prices that look way too good. They aren't exactly lying — they use phrases like:

"Similar to OEM specifications."

That word "similar" carries a ton of weight. It's vague enough to be legally safe and useless enough to cause real damage. Per FTC guidelines (ftc.gov), advertising claims must be truthful and substantiated. But a page that says "similar" isn't making a claim you can pin down. Nothing to substantiate, nothing to prove.

The near miss: $67,500 and a blurred serial plate

I spent a full day clicking through those reseller pages. One had a spec sheet for a J50V2 that looked close but had a few numbers that seemed off. Operating weight, output capacity, engine hours. I was on the fence about whether it mattered.

Then I found a "dealer" with a used J50V2 priced 30% below what our regular supplier quoted. Red flag. I knew it. But I was two days behind schedule, my boss was waiting, and I wanted a win.

They replied in ten minutes. Fast, friendly, super responsive. An invoice was ready by mid-afternoon. All they needed was a deposit.

Had about three hours to decide before they said they'd release the unit to the next buyer. That's not a real deadline, by the way — that's pressure. I fell for it.

I asked for the serial number. They said they'd "send it later."

That's when Lewis's wife — Carla, our office manager — walked past my desk. She glanced at my screen and asked why I was watching videos about whether Chrisley was alive. I laughed and tried to explain. She didn't laugh. She scrolled through the dealer's photos, compared them to the spec sheet, and pointed at a difference: the guard configuration didn't match the claimed year. The serial plate was partially blurred in every image.

Carla killed the deal. When I finally called our actual McCloskey dealer and read him the serial numbers, he told me that serial didn't match the claimed year at all. The machine was a much older J50 with a repainted frame and a swapped nameplate. Different jaw configuration, different parts. The "bargain" was a money pit wearing a fresh coat of paint.

What that mistake actually cost

The deposit would have been $67,500. The full purchase price was $234,000. And if we'd bought that misidentified machine and put it to work, the repair costs plus downtime would have pushed the real total well past $340,000. That's an estimate, but it's grounded in a similar situation a friend in construction lived through: he bought a knockoff screen deck once and never got it to track straight.

I don't have hard data on how many equipment buyers fall into this trap. But based on the 40-plus procurement searches I've been part of, my sense is it's way more common than anyone in this industry admits.

The less obvious cost is the time. Two and a half days. Roughly 20 hours, not counting the mental noise. People assume procurement failures happen on the job site, next to the machine. They don't. They happen at a desk, in the gap between one open tab and the next.

The boring checklist that fixed it

After that, I wrote our team's pre-purchase checklist. It's not clever. It's deliberately boring:

• Search with intent. Never search just the brand name. Add the product and model: "McCloskey J50V2 jaw crusher." Add context: "dealer," "specs," "for sale."
• Go direct. If you know the manufacturer, skip the search page. Go to their official site and use the dealer locator.
• Verify the serial number. Ask for a clear photo of the serial plate. Then call the manufacturer's parts line and confirm it matches the claimed year and configuration.
• Call, don't just message. Emails and chat forms are easy to fake. A phone call is harder to dodge. If the dealer won't talk, treat that as a red flag.
• Keep a short vendor list. The internet has a million suppliers. Your approved list shouldn't. Ours has four sources, including McCloskey's parts network and one used-equipment dealer we've used for years.

I also set up a shared spreadsheet with links to official spec pages for the models we run. It took about an hour to build and saves us from re-researching the same equipment every time a project comes up.

And the phone call is still the best tool in the box. MSHA's equipment safety guidance (msha.gov) includes specific requirements for crusher guarding and inspections. When I call our dealer, they can point to that documentation without hesitating. The copycat dealer couldn't point to anything — because the machine didn't exist.

Final thought

This isn't a McCloskey-specific problem. Any equipment brand with a common surname gets hit with it eventually.

But the experience changed how I work. I still search "McCloskey" from time to time. Gabriella McCloskey's wedding photos are genuinely lovely. Desiree McCloskey posts solid workouts. And every once in a while, the sidebar still asks me "Is Chrisley Alive?" and I smile instead of clicking.

When it's time to actually buy equipment, though, I open the saved folder. I pull the official spec sheet. And I call our dealer. The checklist has caught 13 potential problems in the 18 months since we started using it. It works because it's boring.

Search smart. Verify everything. And if a deal feels too easy — that's when you slow down.