How To Discover And Avoid Moving Scams
We live in an era where anyone who has a van can easily design a company logo and list their numbers in the yellow pages and claim to be a legitimate moving company. The moving industry has been infiltrated by a lot of moving scams; thanks the business being so competitive and the freedom and anonymity that has comes courtesy of the internet so that scammers can easily hide their intentions. The laws surrounding moving companies are still a little murky and that has seen an increase of disputes between moving companies and customers; in most cases it evolves into situations where customers don’t have a written contract form that could prove that there was actually any scam that took place. Your safety as a customer is in being able to identify the most common type of scam that is used by fraudulent moving companies.
Verbal quotes: The most common form of moving scams involves a moving company that gives you a low ball price in terms of a verbal quote; they thereafter end up charging you more once they have finished the task. Most fraudulent companies that do their business this way will almost always want to use your belongings as leverage; they will threaten to withhold some of their stuff in their truck unless you pay them in full.
The only way you can avoid getting into such a scam is by ensuring that you receive a hard copy of the quote or the contract from the moving company. If for instance, the quote you are given is within a per pound quote or a certain cost range, you should ask to see a clause in the quote that confirms that your moving charges will not exceed a certain amount of money. The anonymity of the internet has especially enabled fraudulent companies to plot moving scams as well as those that operate as phony moving companies. Whereas there are legitimate brokers that facilitate small carriers and shippers to customers, there are also thousands of scam brokers that you need to watch out on who promise unrealistic costs only to switch names once the service has been performed.