All industries have some bad apples that leverage your inexperience or lack of relevant knowledge for their gains. They can overcharge for their services or trap you in a cycle of paying for subpar repairs.

These themes crop up in garage door scams. Scammers will often mislead you about their services or the state of your garage doors. Fortunately, there are some obvious signs that you’re being scammed. Here are some of them and ways to identify them.

Emergency Repairs

Amid the current pandemic, people have limited options when it comes to garage door repairs due to scaled-down operations. However, an emergency isn’t a reason to hire a repair person without proper research. If you hire a scammer, they’ll mark up their fees and recommend unnecessary repairs.

To avoid this, you should do your research.View Google Reviews to assess the quality of different garage repair services. Additionally, ask your friends and family for recommendations or to refer you to their garage repairer.

Entrapping Warranties

This scam isn’t as apparent as the emergency repair scam. The scam involves making shoddy repairs and then offering a lifetime warranty for the new parts. For it to work, the person in need of repairs need to make two faulty assumptions: the repairs are high-quality and covered by a warranty.

However, these are unreliable parts. When they inevitably break, you’ll call them for repairs, and because of the warranty, they’ll replace the parts for free. However, while the parts are free, their services aren’t; in fact, the service costs will probably be greater than the cost of the parts.

Subcontracting and Outsourcing

Unlike the previous two scams, subcontracting and outsourcing are commonplace in all industries; in fact, they’re not even necessarily scams. The way the scam works is that a business suggests that it directly handles its products’ production and distribution processes. In reality, the company outsources or subcontracts part or the entirety of their processes.

As mentioned above, hiring independent, third-party contractors isn’t a bad thing per se. Reputable companies will often contract other reputable companies if they think that the latter are better than them in some respects.

However, not only are scammers unreliable themselves, but they’ll also hire unreliable contractors. Additionally, they won’t take responsibility for the product’s quality. As with the other scams, the best way to counter this is to do adequate research before you hire a repair service.

If you’re looking for reliable and quality commercial and home garage door installation in Toledo, OH, contact us at Darkinson Doors. We’ve been in the business for over 70 years, and we offer fiberglass and wood garage doors.