i had to get a locksmith two months ago. i locked myself out of the house, but had my phone. so i called around, found a place that could do it for $60, they came over and cloned my key from a photo.
$19? yeah, thats a scam. $200? yeah, also a scam. $60, basically $30/hour if you count driving and materials? bargain.
your super punch link goes to an embroidery site, fyi
When Avi looked up that address in Google Maps, he saw in the bottom left-hand corner a street-view image of the same pinkish building at the end of a retail strip.
How are they putting fake photos into Google street-view?
Saw this on tumblrā¦
I think the point here is that the āphotoā of the business on their web page was just a Street View screenshot. The scammers couldnāt even be bothered to make a real photo of their supposed location.
I was baffled by the fact people arenāt using the Yellow Pages for this sort of business. I was the strongest antonym of baffled by the fact people are getting taken.
Hell, I imagine a fake locksmith could even get some customers to provide their social and god knows what else as āproofā the house is their residence, but itās not a payoff worth risking losing the sale for.
Unless they ask for your credit card over the phone before coming, let them try and prove it was you who called.
āIām sorry sir, I have no idea what youāre talking about. Why on Earth would I call you? Iām standing inside my house, obviously not having any lock trouble.ā
Except that plenty of people donāt have an online presence beyond the Google automatically generated one. A Street View image would fit right in with that.
Iāll bet locksmiths and other sole-owner trades have a very high rate of that sort of listing instead of a full-blown site or even a placeholder page.
Edit: I just played around with searches for the nearby big city. The first time I ran the search, I got one ad at the top, for what Iām reasonably sure is a legit business. State licence no. on the page, photo of the company van, a local phone number, and no mention of a $19 call fee.
The second time I ran the exact same search, there were three ads at the top, one of which was definitely of the scammy kind. Refreshing the page now seems to have triggered Googleās click-scam protection algorithm and I get no ads at all at the top of the results. Still plenty of sidebar ads though, 3/4 of which are scammy.
(also, do I live in that much of a low-income area? My listings arenāt even for $19 but for $15!)
I wonāt argue with you over that, as I am not the author. I am just sharing how I parsed the quote from Avi to the author, that seeing the same image on Street View raised his suspicions. Itās worth noting that his suspicions were correct, and that the building did not even exist. Thus whoever photoshopped the building also took the time to upload that same building into Street View photos (which is different from Street View itself).
My main lesson from this is that real locksmiths are not as good at SEO or willing to bid as high on AdWords, leaving them buried under a slew of lead gens and unable to outbid them on Cost Per Click. I took the time now to add the number of one with an actual store front to my Evernote and will call him if ever I get locked out of my own flat.
Iām in the UK and I stupidly locked myself out about a month ago so I duckduckgoād for a local locksmith. Just like the article it was a non-local company that dispatched a guy who I figured was from somewhere like Israel. He did try and charge me extra but when I queried it he said he couldnāt be bothered to argue so went back to the original price (Ā£65).
My one takeaway from this article is to find a reputable local locksmith from Yellow Pages or similar and store the number in my phone.
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