Hearing of another Melbourne locksmith scam story is unfortunately becoming more and more common in our industry. Each week more and more Melbourne residents are feeling the expenses of being ripped off by unethical locksmith service providers. Before reading on, if you find yourself a locksmith who is charging well under the average price, then be sure to dig a little deeper before allowing them entry to your property or vehicle.

A local Melbourne locksmith scam story – Be careful!

2 weeks ago we received an after hours call from a distressed customer in Taylors Lakes. The customer had hired a ‘locksmith’ to go to their premises and perform some basic tasks. The tasks were: rekeying external locks, replacing internal locks and fixing a gate lock. All tasks are fairly straight forward and don’t require too much labour work.

The ‘cheap’ locksmith arrived and could only speak a very broken English. Anyways, this locksmith got to work and had replaced the locks on the internal door with a cheap local hardware brand lock. After doing this, the ‘cheap’ locksmith said he would take the gate lock home to fix. The locksmith then charged the customer using their own eftpos machine.

What went wrong?

The locksmith had left and the customer went to test out the new locks. The internal locks worked, but the colours were very different to what was there originally. The external locks still worked with the original keys. The gate lock is still no-where to be seen. And lastly, the payment was processed in US dollars instead of AUD.

What happened next?

The customer called Five Star Locksmiths and we drove out to the property to see what had actually been done. The customer was shocked to find out that the ‘cheap’ locksmith hadn’t done anything with the external locks. They were also disappointed in the lack of quality of the internal locks. Furthermore the customer was completely surprised when they found out that it would have cost them only half the price if they had gone with five Star Locksmiths initially. Even though our call-out fee is higher than the scam locksmiths, the overall price for the job will be of a higher quality and generally at a lower price.

So be careful out there! Educate yourself on finding a proper, Master Locksmith and avoid falling for the locksmith scam. If you have any questions about work completed by a suspicious locksmith, then feel free to call one of our friendly team members on 1800 348 378 and we’ll help you out!