Fake Online
Locksmiths May Be Out to Pick Your Pocket, Too
By DAVID SEGAL
Maybe this has
happened to you.
Locked out of your
car or home, you pull out your phone and type “locksmith” into Google.
Up pops a list of names, the most promising of which appear beneath the paid
ads, in space reserved for local service companies.
You might assume
that the search engine’s algorithm has instantly sifted through the
possibilities and presented those that are near you and that have earned good
customer reviews. Some listings will certainly fit that description. But odds
are good that your results include locksmiths that are not locksmiths at all.
They are call
centers — often out of state, sometimes in a different country — that use a
high-tech ruse to trick Google into presenting them as physical stores in your
neighborhood. These operations, known as lead generators, or lead gens for
short, keep a group of poorly trained subcontractors on call. After your
details are forwarded, usually via text, one of those subcontractors jumps in a
car and heads to your vehicle or home. That is when the trouble starts.
The goal of lead
gens is to wrest as much money as possible from every customer, according to
lawsuits. The typical approach is for a phone representative to offer an
estimate in the range of $35 to $90. On site, the subcontractor demands three
or four times that sum, often claiming that the work was more complicated than
expected. Most consumers simply blanch and pay up, in part because they are
eager to get into their homes or cars.
“It was very late,
and it was very cold,” said Anna Pietro, recalling an evening last January when
she called Allen Emergency, the nearest locksmith to her home in a Dallas
suburb, according to a Google Maps search on her iPhone. “This guy shows up and
says he needs to drill my door lock, which will cost $350, about seven times
the estimate I’d been given on the phone. And he demanded cash.”
The phone number at
Allen Emergency is now disconnected.
It is a classic
bait-and-switch. And it has quietly become an epidemic in America, among the
fastest-growing sources of consumer complaints, according to the Consumer
Federation of America.
Lead gens have
their deepest roots in locksmithing, but the model has migrated to an array of
services, including garage door repair, carpet cleaning, moving and home
security. Basically, they surface in any business where consumers need someone
in the vicinity to swing by and clean, fix, relocate or install something.
“I’m not exaggerating when
I say these guys have people in every large and midsize city in the United
States,” said John Ware, an assistant United States attorney in St. Louis,
speaking of lead-gen locksmiths. 
A locksmith’s shop on a street in Sun City, Ariz., top, turned out to be
a fiction that was created for the locksmith by a web design firm using
Photoshop at what is, in fact, a vacant lot, bottom. Credit
Photograph by Caitlin O’Hara for The New
York Times
To read more about it, just go to Fake Online Locksmiths May Be Out to Pick Your Pocket, Too
