NYT article on fraudulent locksmiths

[escher7]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/busin ... .html?_r=0

[MBI]

I've seen a lot of articles on the topic but that has to be one of the most comprehensive I've read yet.

[GWiens2001]

When I was in Denver, Colorado a couple years ago, I wanted to find some locksmith shops so I could look for unusual locks during some free time. I limited the search to a five mile radius, and had about a dozen hits. Drove by each listed address. Only one was a legitimate locksmith shop.

Heck, one of the addresses was the hotel I was staying at. Was able to rule that one out without difficulty.

Gordon

[Doogs]

Out of curiosity I did a Google search for my town as there are no locksmiths here other than Mike who is semi-retired and doesn't advertise. And the results were actually not bad. This is the only "locksmith" ad that seems hokey.

http://www.24hourlocksmithguys.com/cana ... gananoque/

Here's the initial search results:

https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=ch ... +Gananoque

So all in all it doesn't seem to be much of a problem here (Kingston area) as it is on the US side. Now whether that would hold true for the larger metropolitan areas I don't know, but I imagine it's at least as bad as what was posted in the OP knowing how prevalent scammers are in places like Montreal,Toronto and Ottawa.

[Papa Gleb]

Iv realized this issue myself when I got acquired the love for lock. A place like NYC is the reason these gens exist. Just imagine there are approx. 2 locks per door, 60 doors per apartment building, 8-10 building on one side of a city block, 30-40 building in a full city block equal approx. 4500 (rounded off) lock on each city block and the City is made up of these blocks. This also doesnt count for the sky scapers which host 30, 50 or even 90 floors so out of all those people, there are many rich people who dont simply dont care how much it costs, there are people who just dont care enough to do something about it or care enough to do their research, and many others leaving only a small percentage of people who would do right when faced with a scammer so even if they have to loss 1 client, there are plenty more to go around. To my surprise, in Brooklyn (20m from the City, we call Manhattan the City but everyone outside of NY calls the 5 boroughs the City) there really arent many of these gens, I know because I made it my mission to visit each shop in Brooklyn and so far I have visited a good 60-70% of them, and out of that maybe 5% of that are these fakes with empty lots for addresses.