The locksmith ripoffs are REAL!!!

This story is from the person who has exposed, and followed each fake locksmith and poser across the USA.  Hats off to him for his tenacious efforts to thwart this criminal operation in nearly every city and metro area.

These counterfeit locksmiths are real. They are nationwide and spreading like cockroaches. I am The Vice President of the Illinois Indiana Locksmith Association and have been tracking these gypsy type rip-offs for more then two years. They have been impersonating locksmiths all over the country. It is so large and almost mind boggling how widespread these phonies are. The are in every major city in the US. there are many of these companies springing up all over the nation and they are all some how related to each other. The common denominator is that they all appear to be run by middle eastern men. Most of the employees are here on tourist visas. There have been some in Texas that were arrested for acting as locksmiths without a license and it was found out their visas were expired and they were deported.

They are not small individual locksmiths but rather large organized crime type outfits.

The actual people who come out to homes to do the dirty work are employees that have been trained to rip-off the consumer. The actions and mo of all the individuals seem the same. They are taught to rip off the consumer by the big dog scum that run these outfits. There general scam is to quote a service call price of usually 55.00 and then up the charge when they get there. they routinely will drill house locks and actually charge you extra to destroy the locks so they can rip you off some more by selling you a 5.00  lock for 100.00 or even 200.00. They use bait and switch pricing.

Verizon has deleted almost 100,000 phony locksmith listings from there online directory in the past year. They have also about a week or two ago actually separated their advertising from the phone company portion of the business. The new company is now called idearc. I can only assume this is a logical action to avoid the possible liability of what is going on.

If you want to do a test go to smartpages.com and search for locksmith and choose a city and or state. Example if you search locksmith and Pennsylvania the first 1000 listings and even more are all two different scam locksmith companies. The addresses are all fraudulent. Try Miami Florida, Los Angeles, CA, and many other large cities you will see the same thing.

These phony companies are raking in millions each year. One of the new York companies it has been said they are making 20 million a year.

I spoke to one of the employees at a state court hearing here in Chicago. I was told by this scammer employee while engaging in some friendly intelligence gathering conversation that they have inside people at the yellow pages and they receive huge discounts for the large full page ads they are placing in cities across the nation.

This is one of the scary parts they have a near monopoly on the cell phone 411 system. They have filled the data bases with so many phony address listings in most major cities that when you call 411 on your cell phone ( which most people do now)
you will get the same counterfeit locksmiths over and over again. you could ask for 10 listings and they will all be one of these scammers or another with some local address that is phony. they use thousands of different names also. It is always the same 55.00 service quoted for a lockout and after they unlock your stuff the price goes much higher. These companies are really not in the rural areas but the are in just about all major cities from coast to coast and from top to bottom.

Some of these companies are as follows

superb solutions- Now known as Dependable lock
this company is in the Bronx new York.
some of their alias's
sos locksmith
speedway locksmith
priceline locksmith
always available locksmith
chicago-locksmith.com
houston-locksmith.com
miami-locksmith.com
( the cities go on and on with websites that use the cities name then a dash and then locksmith.com)
usatotalsecurity.com
they use hundreds of other names such as:
locksmith 24 hour inc.
24 hour locksmith
emergency locksmith
the names just keep going on.

These companies almost always ask for your zip code.

The next company.

USA Locksmith- aka prestige business solutions
teanick - New Jersey
many of their names look like this.
#0#0#0 emergency locksmith
01 01 01 24 hour locksmith
# 1 3 1 000 locksmith
there are an untold amount of combinations like this.
in the Detroit suburban area they are using common names such as O'Neil's family locksmith, town square locksmith, and many more.
This company has untold thousands of phony addresses and listings all across the united states.

Another company is called:

Golden locksmith solutions - Chamblee Georgia a suburb outside of Atlanta.

They use names such as :
A locksmith
papa locksmith
24x7 locksmith and others

THESE ARE JUST THREE THERE ARE MORE!!!

IF you want to see a collection of some of the news stories around the country you are welcome to go to http://www.aloa.org/and click the phony locksmith link on the home page and it will give you a page full of news links all over the country.