Aerial Force warning

Catnaps wrote: »

Rang Aerial Force yesterday to book an engineer as tv signal very poor, lost channels etc. Booked us in next day, and then engineer appeared. £49 call out.

Husband over saw what he was doing, he claimed no signal at the tv, went into the attic where the coax was joined to the aerial, said there was a poor signal there. We have a second tv and aerial which was fine so he decided to check the signal on that (never been a problem). Said it was very weak signal and it required either a new aerial at £300 or a high density amplifier for £240.

Once he'd put the cables back together, without fitting anything, we noticed the signal much improved and then questioned him about it. He became very aggressive and offensive, saying are you telling me how to do my job, 25 years experience etc.

Husband told him to remove everything he had fitted and leave. At this stage he demanded the call out charge aggressively, however my husband was at the time stood in front of a picture of him in uniform as a policeman, at which he returned to the attic on the pretext of collecting tools, he then cut the ends off the cables and promptly left without payment.

My husband later found the cut cables, went to DIY store and bought new connectors for £5, fitted them himself and the tv now retuned has 100% signal!!

This so called engineer found a loose connector and wanted to charge in excess of £200.

Avoid at all costs, their website very misleading. Clearly looking for vulnerable customers. We shall report to trading standards also.

askmeaboutsofas wrote: »

I thought the name of that company sounded familiar! They were featured on BBC Watchdog a while back:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/V2z4DP0rvTjfK9vpwFFl6q/aerialforce


If I remember correctly, their usual shtick is to take advantage of vulnerable people, and as you experienced they don't do the work, overcharge hugely for what work they do, and try to intimidate people into paying for work that wasn't done.



Might be worth getting in touch with Watchdog, they do revisit some of the "rogue traders". Also very much worth informing Trading Standards about the guys behaviour, they do take action if there's a lot of complaints about a particular company or tradesman. I'd normally say report it to the police as well, but maybe your husband can just tell someone about it? I'm sure it's not legal to deliberately damage your customer's property in a fit of pique!


While you're unlikely to get any benefit to yourselves from reporting him, somebody needs to stop the guy.