Call Us Today You have probably seen carpet cleaning coupons online, in the newspaper or in the mail. The coupon will say something to the effect that you can get three rooms of carpet cleaned for $29.95. This sounds like a good deal right? There couldn’t be anything further from the truth.
At Carpet Cleaning Melbourne, we are here to tell you about this very common carpet cleaning scam that still works because it is such an easy one to pull. Here’s how the scam works:
You are sitting in your living room, looking at your dirty carpet for months. You keep meaning to something about it, but like many home improvement projects, you keep putting it off. Finally someone one gets upset enough in your household about the dirty carpet and you realize that you have to do something about it.
Magically, a coupon from a carpet cleaning company you have never heard of shows up in the mail or in the paper and it says, “3 rooms of carpet cleaned for $29.95.” What a coincidence! You not only get the carpets cleaned right away, but it won’t cost you much more than the price of going out to dinner!
The carpet cleaning person shows up on time and everything looks great, until they get started. You will quickly realize that these are not in fact, cleaning professionals, but ‘bait and switch, con artists. The first thing they will not do is not honor the coupon, stating a variety of reasons like “this coupon is for smaller rooms,” “this coupon is just to get us in the door”, “and this coupon is only for the steam, not the cleaning solution.”
The cleaner will talk you into doing the work, and since they look legitimate, it makes sense that it would cost the new amount of money they are asking for. If you don’t go ahead with the cleaning, you may have to call the police to get them out of your house, or pay the $300 they will ask for when they are finished actually ruining your carpets.
Carpet Cleaning Melbourne has these tips to help you avoid this criminal scam:
- A coupon for less than $25 per room is a bait and switch scam. Most professional carpet cleaners will agree that no room can be cleaned for less than $25-$35 per room.
- Most carpet cleaning coupons will not have the address of the company, just the phone number. You actually don’t know who you are letting into your home.
When you call the number, if you need stain removal or a quote for more rooms than are listed on the coupon, they will not give you an estimate over the phone.
