Warning: Rated People and MyBuilder

Hi all, the BBC has recently done an investigation piece where they approached several 'Trusted Trader' websites to see if they could get a fake handyman approved. They managed to get onto Rated People and MyBuilder without any checks at all. You can read about it here and it's still up on iplayer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-42783279

According to the program on iPlayer, Checkatrade at least required insurance documentation and Which? Trusted Trader required a face to face meeting.

My personal recommendation is Buy With Confidence - Trading Standards Approved (https://www.buywithconfidence.gov.uk) as this is run by Trading Standards and it requires a Trading Standards audit for approval. It's the only not for profit scheme that I know of.
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Comments

  • hollydays
    hollydays Posts: 19,812
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    It’s not foolproof I guess as I once used a trading standards registered painter who ade a bad job and afterwards never bothered to give me the review sheet to fill out and send back.
  • inkwat
    inkwat Posts: 31 Forumite
    Things can always go wrong, but at least with a Government scheme you can complain directly back to Trading Standards if something does go wrong.
  • pgoncalv
    pgoncalv Posts: 86
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    I used mybuilder and had some good results. It is not easy to get recommendations and very local builders for large work, often there are only a handful of tradesmen that are busy anyway.


    But despite being careful I had issues. A couple of things to beware:
    - feedback would only be shown if you hired the trader. So with some traders, if they think you are following the advice you find on sites like moneysaving and they are after less careful or vulnerable customers, they will may mess you about and miss appointments or quote over the odds. I estimate that some traders quote 20 jobs and get one interested customer. The thing is that mybuilder will not publish this feedback and so the best traders may be crowded out.
    - also if you engage a trader independently that you eventually find to be listed in mybuilder and you want to give feedback, this will need to be accepted by the trader (they are essentially customers of mybuilder). So a lot of rosy reviews I have seen are fake. I also know of traders that get feedback well before the job is finish, I wonder why that would be?


    Checkatrade does publish verified feedback independently of how the trader was engaged, I have found that while usually being more expensive tradesmen, they are better quality. But the issue of not turning up or quoting ridiculous or not at all is common.
  • Rated People don't want to know when customers have problems with builders! Obviously they don't bother to check whether the builders are honest, unfortunately I amouot of pocket to the tune of £1,304 when a builder on their site failed to pass on a refund to me in respect of a summerhouse. I am not his only disgruntled customer either, at least one other person used Rated People and the same builder owes them money too! These sites should take responsibility for workmen, or at the very least check them out thoroughly BEFORE passing their names on to customers who end up out of pocket, and sometimes with bad workmanship into the bargain! Our builder walked off the job which cost thousands more to complete!
  • psamuel
    psamuel Posts: 40
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    edited 28 February 2019 at 2:13PM
    My experience from rated people
    Obtained a quote for £1700 of work , electrician cancelled the day before as it was his birthday!
    Also received a second quote within minutes of the first quote by sms , as the work had been placed I saved the number.
    Then asked the second electrician to quote , agreed a price , then he failed to turn up despite agreeing to the work and price and never even got in touch to explain.
    Complained to rated people who kindly rang me back, I informed her of the telephone numbers from which I received quotes and low and behold they were from the same company!
    The second sms never disclosed their company details.
    Quite disingenuous and very clever, quite a way to inflate prices.
    I have now complained to their vetting team.
    Totally untrustworthy.
  • I, too, was scammed by someone I got from Rated People. Actually, this happened twice. I keep hearing horror stories about builders, and consumer programmes on TV tell more of them. Some people's lives are ruined because of the amount of money they have been conned out of, and others, like me, suffer mental health problems (depression and stress). Is it not time (in fact, long overdue) for the government to introduce a compulsory licensing scheme for workmen? Could someone start a campaign, or a petition to the government, in this respect? I'm afraid that I can't do it due to my depression, but I would certainly support any such movement.
  • i am sick of buying leads from rated peaple ,and the jobs are not even jobs they take your money and dont give a refund ,i now have to sue them to get my money refunded ,do not use the bunch of scammers :mad:
  • Every month they say we give you £45 credit to buy leads.I got fake leads every month.
    That is if I didn't use my credit card then I got work.
    So I left rated people and moved to a more experienced job site... No deffo not my builder haha there worse than rated people
  • Albala
    Albala Posts: 310
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    One of those types of concerns got in touch with me saying they had a customer for me (they gave me a first name, & brief job description). I went ballistic as I wasn't registered with them, would never agree to be registered with or associated with any scheme like it, and it looked to me like they had dredged my name from a personal fb post where I'd done a small job which wasn't my normal sort of work but needed a fb contact linky. I found people doing the job in question full time have often been approached by the same company to try to get them to pay for non-existent leads (not a building trade, BTW). It's not just customers that get scammed, in other words, sometimes the tradesmen themselves are getting scammed.

    I told them to get me off their database, and was quite rude about it. They wrote back and said they would, and I didn't hear from them again.

    After some thought, I reported them to data protection, as I felt they had at the very least run rough shod over data protection rules by suggesting they worked as my agent in any way without any permission from me to use or store my contact details. Got standard holding reply and thought that would be the end of it, but a few weeks later it was followed up as they had begun an investigation into the company concerned, and wanted details, which I passed on.

    Hopefully a nice big book will be thrown at them. Hard.
  • When these types of sites first started arriving on the internet scene, conventional enquiries began to shrink. I'd managed to do about 40 jobs a year as a soul trader for about 13 years, when I first heard about RatedPeople! They had an article in a paper or magazine boasting about reaching their 4 millionth job posting! I thought there all the customers have gone. So thinking the sites success was in part due to customer and trade fairness, I joined up, only to find, they sold a single lead for as much as £25 to up-to as many as 4 trades persons. This was a few years ago now, I'm sure they still don't do that. So even if the customer just wanted a price, which means, no actual work for the tradesmen, quite understandably, RatedPeople would have received up-to £100.00! I'm sure customers had no idea at the time, that this is the way it can work? I've since found myBuilder sell the same lead over and over again too, regardless of what the customer is after. Maybe it's time for a change, for these profiteers to be replaced with a not for profit? I'd sign up in an instant.
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