About 4 years ago, the Missouri Attorney General was instrumental in catching a gang of crooks deliberately scamming consumers by impersonating locksmiths.
That particular gang became well known across the country for willfully ripping off unsuspecting consumers.
The locksmith industry is one of the oldest industries in the world. There are a small number of qualified locksmiths across this country who still do business with ethics and morals, but they are seeing the trade brought to disrepute by sheisters bent on ripping people off.
In June last year, #ABC's The Lookout played a segment where they caught and filmed the leader of the scam operations, who has since escaped the country without paying fines and taxes owed.
But the scammers continue to trick customers into using them with nefarious search engine tactics. In fact, if you type "Locksmith Your City", replacing "Your City" with the name of your town, and press search, you will be bombarded with ads that point you to these companies.
(after the break, we will list some of the companies and their websites. we'd appreciate anyone reading this article to list other scammer companies in the comments) All comments are subject to moderation.
Most genuine locksmith companies do not use Google Adwords to promote their businesses, in part due to the ridiculous over priced cost of clicks. When Google first rolled out Adwords about 6 years ago, the cost for clicks was in the pennies. Many companies signed on and then Google began auctioning the top spots to the highest bidder. The cost spiraled out of control for little return for many players, partly because the scammer companies, mostly Israeli's who are experts in Internet search engine optimisations and building websites, managed to use black hat techniques to trick Google's system.
Google eventually wised up and installed some security parameters because click fraud was rampant and companies would receive incredibly high advertising bills for little to no return on investment. The scammers worked their best to click on the ads, multiple times daily from different ip address locations across the country, running up a companies cost.
Then, after those companies pulled their advertising from Google Adwords, these scammers came in and effectively stole the top positioning.
With Google continuing to depend more and more on advertising revenue to bolster their many billions of profits, ordinary small business people, who for years and years continued to operate ethical and moral businesses, employ many workers and pay taxes and contribute to the local economies, lost out to these scammer operations with huge advertising budgets and nefarious tactics, causing many small locksmith businesses to close down and terminate many workers.
The scam operations always advertise the lowest prices online, but must change their prices mid-job to maintain their businesses, hence why they will rip you off. In all industries this is known as bait and switch and is a con job aimed at defrauding you.
The source below, shows an article in the Riverfront Times about the story.
Genuine locksmiths will be able to provide an accurate total cost prior to beginning your project
Many of the genuine locksmith companies you will find online are prepared to list their physical address on their sites, but recently the scammers have decided to include bogus addresses to fool customers into thinking they are local and legitimate. Dont Be Fooled! or be prepared to lose a fortune.
Some of the scammer companies are:
www.locksmith-st-louis.com
www.crevecoeurlocksmith.com
www.locksmithofstlouis.com/locksmith
www.247locksmithstlouis.com
www.americaslocksmithservices.com
www.stlouislocksmith.org
www.locksmithsaintlouis.net
www.captainlocksmith.com
www.locksmithconnections.com
www.247locksmithinstlouis.com
www.stlouislocksmithsolutions.com
www.lockjocksmo.com
www.locksmithgenie.com
www.speedy-locksmith-saint-louis.com
www.prolocksmith.mobi
www.locksmithstl.com
www.247-local-locksmith.com
(source...)
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