dormouse1953

When I got home last night, there were a load of blank messages on my answer machine, all from the last two days.  And my phone rang as I was getting up at 8:30 this morning.

A bit of back story.  About three weeks ago, the doorbell rang and it was a young guy claiming his company was doing some work in the area and noticed I had a couple of wall tiles missing from the front of the house.  He'd replace them for a fiver.  I said yes.

Of course, as soon as his mate had climbed onto the porch roof to replace the second tile, he pointed out that the roof support was rotten and offered to replace it for about £2K.  Before I knew it, I had accepted the offer.  And then, when the work was complete, he insisted in payment in cash, which I finally knocked down to 25% in cash, the rest a cheque, which he asked me to make out to an F. Smith.  I got the message and realised I'd been had, but paid to get rid of them.

A few days later they returned, they said to inspect the work and arrange for the receipt and guarantee, but then told me that there was a problem with my roof tiles that they would deal with for another £3K.  I said no, and although they were very insistent, they finally left.  The guarantee never turned up, but they did get my name and phone number.

Anyway, the person phoning this morning claimed to know nothing about this, he was doing work for a neighbour who had problems with the drains in a house they just bought.  They needed access to a manhole cover on my property and would charge me a deposit of £4.5K. for equipment they'd have to use.  I baulked at this, but he said the blockage could be from work I'd had done recently, which he'd asked about, saying they could have blocked the drains with stuff.  However, the only manhole cover on my property is out the back, and the workmen the other week didn't got there.  (They did put building debris in my garden waste bin, which I had to pick out by hand.)

I even got a phone call from the person wanting to move in, apparently staying at the nearby Holiday Inn as he couldn't move into the house while there were drainage problems, and phoning from a mobile.  The house number they gave is some way down the street; if he had problems with his drains, so would half the street.

I phoned the police for advice.  Thye took a report and also put me on to Action Fraud, who are coordinating reports on to things like this.  Both told me not to pay anything.

I was on the phone to Action Fraud for about half an hour and there were constant beeps in the background which I later found to be call waiting.  (I hadn't realised that this still showed up as missed calls on my phone log, there were 8 of them.)  Almost as soon as I put the phone down, they phoned again and when I told them I'd called the police, who'd told me not to pay anything, they threatened legal action and put the phone down, but they haven't phoned since.