Ripoff Report.com

Dear Readers,

I recently posted a rebuttal/response on a cool website, http://www.ripoffreport.com/ It was cool. Here it is: Enjoy.

(It turns out that there are a lot of complaints against Northstar Alarm Services.)

Stevem,

You’re right about salespeople checking your credit without your permission or knowledge. I used to work for Northstar Alarm Services as a salesperson.

When we were trying to sell an alarm system to somebody, we would say something like, “We can only sell these alarm systems to homeowners, so we just have to verify that you actually are the homeowner," and we make a phone call on our cell phones to the Northstar Alarm Services headquarters in Utah. Then people at the headquarters ran a credit check on the potential customer, using only their name, address and phone number, I think.

If the potential customer’s credit was good enough, then we continued trying to sell the alarm system, but if the customer’s credit wasn’t good enough, we came up with some excuse (usually a lie) for getting out of there and moving on to the next house.

Here’s another sneaky and dishonest thing we would do. (At least this is what we did when I worked for them in the summer of 2007.) When we were checking a potential customer’s credit by calling the headquarters, we had a code worked out. We said on the cell phone conversation, which happened in front of the potential customer, “Hi, this is so-and-so. I just have to verify home ownership for so-and-so who lives at such and such address.” But the person on the other end of the line knew that “verify homeownership” really meant “check their credit.” Pretty sneaky, huh?

The person thinks that we're checking to see if they are the homeowner, but really we're checking their credit. I doubt home security system salespeople would get as many sales if they honestly said, "Before we can make this transaction, I need to check your credit."

I put a long entry about Northstar Alarm Services on my personal blog, Telemoonfa Time, here: http://telemoonfa.blogspot.com/2008/03/northstar-alarm-services.html

Sincerely,
Telemoonfa