INDIANAPOLIS – After several local residents were swindled out of thousands, the Indiana Attorney General has decided to file a lawsuit against a group of alleged home and landscape scammers.
Nine different homeowners say they were tricked, including 82-year-old Phyliss Brown, a retired North Central High School teacher.
She takes notes on everything financial, like a good teacher would.
So that’s why she made a good witness. She says she wrote it down in November of 2014 when a man representing C & C Tree Service knocked on her door, saying he was there to clean her gutters.
She says she was expecting a different contractor sometime that week, so when C & C arrived, she assumed they were connected and let them get to work. But then, just 90 minutes later, she was asked to pay $750.
“I should have asked. I should have said, ‘How much is this going to cost me?’ Now that I think about it, I’m thinking, ‘Boy. I must have been really gullible,’” Brown said.
She paid the money, just like eight other people did, as we’re learning in a 21-page lawsuit announced Thursday. They were all allegedly scammed by the same company that knocked on her door offering services.
In one case, the lawsuit claims a woman wrote 63 personal checks worth over $30,000.
That could’ve happened to Brown had she not turned the company away the next two times they came knocking.
Brown says it’s changed the way she lives her life.
“Now I’m much more cautious,” she said. “I don’t think I’d even go to the door unless I knew who it was.”
C & C and the 14 people linked to it are now facing a lawsuit.
The Attorney General’s Office says there are a few ways to protect yourself:
- Check with the Better Business Bureau to see if complaints have been filed against a company that is soliciting.
- Get multiple price quotes from different contractors before the work begins.
- If a company is offering services, get a contract in writing that details what will be done, how long it will take and how much it will cost.
- And never pay for the entire project before the work begins. You should begin paying, at the most, a third of the total cost as down payment.
And always make sure to report suspicious activity from a business.
We attempted to reach out to C & C Tree Service for comment. No phone number was listed for the company or for the individual defendants.
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