We contacted 1 Mover Depot to move a one bedroom apartment with a piano from Long Beach to El Segundo, CA. They faxed us an hourly rate as a quote.
Only after the movers arrived that they informed us of a $700 surcharge for the piano.
After the movers drove our property to the final destination at Public Storage, the foreman of the moving company convinced us to use their storage facility instead of Public Storage. Their storage was cheaper and they would take care of the rest of the move without us. The foreman specifically told us if we used their storage facility, we could freely move our items in and out of their location at 1 Mover Depot during their business hours.
The foreman closed up their truck and ready to leave, then had us sign all the forms before he showed us the final bill for the move. It was then clear to us that the mover added numerous fraudulent and padded charges to the bill.
The padded Charges included overtime charges when they worked for less than 7 hours, overcharges on packing, and they charged us 3 hours at an overtime rate to unload the truck at their facilities when it took them less than an hour to unload the truck when they finally returned our property two weeks later.
The foreman threatened us they would confiscate everything in the truck unless we signed that we accepted their bill and the first month storage. We signed the final bill and the credit charge under duress thinking we would never see our belongings again if we refused.
We found out the following Monday that we were not allowed to access our property at their location. This was unacceptable to us so we asked them to return everything back to our original storage location in El Segundo. The owner told us we would have to forfeit the balance of the $250 monthly storage fee we paid in advance, and pay him an additional $364 flat rate to move our property back to our original intended destination.
The owner refused to negotiate and did his best to intimidate us so we would oblige. He worried us about what he could do to our belongings and felt we needed to get our property out of his control as soon as possible. We also needed immediate access to our property.in order to do so, we decided it was best to agree to their demands and worry about the charges later.
I disputed the charge with my credit card company, but they reversed their decision when the mover sent altered my remarks on one of their forms to make it look like I was a happy customer.
They also lied to my credit card company by saying that they needed to move our property to their location because the elevator was broken at Public Storage and could not access our unit.
Our storage unit is on the ground floor; no elevator was needed to access our unit.
The total charges for both moves were $2,865 when my calculations show we should had been charged $1,104 for the move.
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