How are this company still operating? Obvious fraudsters

I booked a gas cert and boiler service that was supposed to happen today. The engineer didn’t show, instead I received an email saying the appointment is cancelled because the engineer tried to gain access but couldn’t. “Evidence” was provided in the form of a photo of my house.

Upon closer inspection, the photo is straight from google street view! There are plant pots in the picture that were moved weeks ago and are no longer there.

This is an absolute textbook case of attempted fraud, given they tried to charge me the £30 callout charge. The openrent support worker had the audacity to say he believes the engineer did attempt to gain entry. And that as a “goodwill gesture” he would be refunded me the callout fee.

Absolute scum, I cannot believe this company have not been investigated by the police for fraud.

1 Like

That’s an absolute joke.
I always book direct and maintain control.

Hi @Stan1 - Really sorry to hear about this. We’ve investigated this subsequently to your experience, and this engineer has stopped receiving jobs from OpenRent due to their poor communication and behaviour in this instance. We understand one bad experience can be enough to stop a landlord using our services, and don’t take it lightly.

Our standards are definitely higher than this, and I apologise you received messaging referring to any “goodwill gesture”. This simply isn’t good enough and of course you are entitled to a full refund (which has been issued). Sadly, we do sometimes have disputes around callouts with engineers providing evidence of attending whilst landlords or tenants have not been at the property but claim otherwise - so it’s not always immediately obvious to the team without further investigation the exact scenario. I would like to apologise if it wasn’t clear that your case would be investigated fully following our refund to you (which we applied regardless of the outcome of the investigation), but that has now concluded.

We work with several thousand engineers across the UK, conducting a huge number of jobs for us, who are all gas safe registered. We quickly remove engineers when they don’t meet our standards, so cases like this are thankfully extremely rare - but we’re confident if you were to try using us again you’d get a much better experience.

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