Either it’s happened to you or it’s happened to someone you know; something breaks, you go to a specialist to get it fixed, and you end up with a bill that’s infuriatingly high for the low-quality service you received.
This can hit the hardest when it happens in your very own home. After all, nothing gets quite under your skin like an unfinished project around the house, particularly if it reminds you of being swindled by a dishonest repairman.
If you’re still simmering from the last time a repairman entered your house (most likely within an 8-hour window), you’re going to love the social experiment that Inside Edition produced to catch dishonest workers in the act.
Appropriately titled House of Shame, Inside Edition placed a reporter inside a would-be suburban home with hidden cameras built into every nook and cranny. The reporter, pretending to be an unassuming homeowner, hires a technician to clean her air ducts.
The experiment is run twice, with two separate and unsuspecting technicians performing their jobs under the watchful eye of air duct experts, who are watching the footage from a control room in the basement.
The first technician advertised a special deal for his services: $29.99 for an air duct cleaning. However, when he arrived at the house, he seemed to have something else in mind.
Thinking he was alone during his inspection of the attic. the man unzipped a bag of pool cues and looked inside. He briefly flashed his flashlight into the ventilation system, then returned downstairs and told the psuedo homeowner that it would cost $700 to clean her air ducts.
“He inspected the pool cues longer than he inspected the unit,” observed the expert.
The second repairman fared little better than the first. While he did do some cleaning, he only worked when the reporter was in the room with him. Once the psuedo homeowner left the room, the repairman stopped working, lingering around and waiting for enough time to have passed for him to be able to pretend he completed the project.
This is why the Better Business Bureau advises homeowners to research technicians before hiring someone to enter their house and potentially cheat them out of their money. There are websites rating technicians for a reason; you need to pick trustworthy professionals for any work that involves entering your house and performing a service, especially when you don’t totally understand the ins-and-outs of that service.
To see these cheaters get caught in the act, make sure to watch the video!
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