Tips To Finding A Locksmith Who Won't Con You With Hidden Charges
Beware the seductive effect of numbers in advertising!
Skip the sponsored links on Google.
Skip the paid-for advertising at the top of search engines. The scammers are more active than real locksmiths in buying that prominent placement, to bait the most people each day. (That, combined with gouging customers, is how they afford the most expensive advertising).
Call a number found in the organic listings - that's the people down below the paid-for advertising in the box at the top of Google.
"15 Minute Locksmith"/"15 Min Response"
This means someone will call back in 15 minutes. You'd think it means they intend to rush through the city streets to provide the service in just 15 minutes. Yeah, so did I at first. But reports from the victims of these scammers are that the claim about a "15 minute response!" is just a call-back.
"$15 Service Fee" is intended to trick you.
(Same with $19, $29 and $35 "service fee")
Especially for lockouts, if someone gives a service fee but hides the labor cost for any reason, they're playing a bait-and-switch con on you. The bait's the low service fee. Then they more than make up for that low fee in labor costs, and that's the switch. And they leave the labor costs vague until after a technician's arrived, because they know you'd say NO if you knew what they really intend to charge. It's not because, as they pretend, they need to see your locks before they can name their price.
When deciding between two quotes like "nineteen dollars and then some" from one locksmith and "fifty dollars total" from another locksmith, you may be tempted to think: "Maybe the '$19-and-then-some guy' will be cheaper than $50." It's a losing gamble! Notice that the flat-fee locksmith doesn't need to see the locks first - that should say a great deal. Also there's an average that is the "going-rate" for any given service that's determined by market forces. So an odd-man-out, someone that seems much cheaper than others, should make you suspicious, not raise your hopes.
"Prices Start At ..."
I see on one of the scammer's websites they've posted a table with a break-down of their prices: "Our Pricing = $15 Service call fee + labor & hardware costs". Their $15 service fee is "fixed", and the "additional fees" are listed as "starting at $19" for this and "starting at $35" for that. The first impression a table of costs gives is they're being straightforward about what their costs are. The first impression is wrong, as usual. They have not said what their prices are, and an alert consumer's question is "How MUCH?", not "What's the least?" It's a great mistake to assume the total cost may be close to the "prices start at" number.
Don't talk to dispatch operators.
An operator in a "call center" cannot give you accurate information about prices, time-of-arrival, or anything at all. They're not in constant contact with a fleet of roaming locksmiths… In fact, if you've phoned a scamming locksmith operation, then you're likely talking to someone in Florida.
If it's a scammer that shows up because you phoned someone in the sponsored links and said OK to a $15 service fee, then his excuse for both how late he is and how much more expensive he is than you were lead to believe will likely be to blame the dispatch operator for not knowing anything…
"Nationwide"
All the most skilled and most honest locksmiths are still small business, so seek these out and talk directly with the locksmith. If you have an image of big companies with shops here and there, then please get the image out of your head. Some of the scammer's websites have "locators" - fields where you can type in your city or zip code to find "the locksmith nearest you". No one's that omnipresent… it's yet another deception. You get the same call center that tells the same lies, regardless of what information you put into their "locksmith locator".
The only way to get a meaningful estimated time-of-arrival is talking directly with the locksmith who's going to deliver the service and figuring out whether you trust his ETA or not.
Discounts.
10% Off, 15% Off. It's a smart business practice to offer discounts, because obviously it draws customers. But the promises in advertising require people to think things through rather than react automatically to mere numbers. If you mention the discount first before they've named the fee for whatever service you're wanting, then the cost can be adjusted to offset the discount. And if you're talking with one of the "$15 service fee" companies, they're actively hiding their actual price from you. So… what's 15% off of an estimation so vague it could be anything? It's a mistake to just trust that he's going to forthrightly do all the math for you. Do the math yourself! Be sure to get ALL the numbers you need to do that while still on the phone.
Summing it all up
Numbers work marvelously as bait, because they seem more definite than words. But they're actually only meaningful in the context of other numbers. Yet people see (or hear) a small service fee, or a big discount, and too quickly assume "savings!" - when actually they don't have any idea what the number really means because it needs the context of the total cost to even mean anything.
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An update, 10 February 2012:
Kansas City's Fox 4 News reported on a local scammer recently. In the video they focus on what can happen AFTER you call a scammer. In my tips, I focused on what comes BEFORE - namely, the tricks they use to get your call. The $35 service fee is one thing that Alpha does a bit differently than the scammers I describe (the ones that are more prominent than Alpha on the Internet). But they're all splinters of one nationwide racketeering operation that was imported to America some years back.
--------------Express Lock Service in Overland Park, Kansas, has the fastest response to all cities in and around Johnson County, KS. And we're available all through the week, 8am to 11:30pm. Most importantly of all, we tell you the price straight-up, and it's not a lie.
