An unlicensed landscaper tried to charge my elderly parents $15k for 6 hours of work. Is this a common scam?
Today I got a call in a panic by my elderly parents (mom is 75 and dad is 89), saying that they hired a landscaper to help fix up their front yard and they're demanding $15k. This sent me into a panic because I live 3 hours away and cannot just drop everything and drive down there to assess the situation. So after a lot of explaining from both parents, I find out some guy is going from house to house offering his landscaping service (this is clearly not a licensed company), see's my dad working on the front yard and somehow convinces him to have his crew do the work for him. Apparently they cleaned up some weeds and pavers, and filled in approximately 600sqft of space with something... I'm not sure what it was because it sounded like top soil, but the guy on the phones English was not great. Somehow when they came to do the work, they did not give my dad an estimate and instead just asked him what he wanted done, told him that the work would cost $10 "per bag" of soil, and thats it. Given that my dad is really old and not 100% anymore, I guess he just agreed to that expecting a few hundred dollars of work to be done.
After 6 hours (and 4 laborers) the owner comes to my dad and demands $15k saying they used 1500 bags of whatever they used. My parents panicked and paid them whatever they could afford, which was about $2k (and they do not have money, so this is really hurting them), then called me probably expecting me to cover the rest. I went into a complete fury and forced my dad to hand the phone to the owner who I yelled at for the next few minutes, telling him hes full of shit, there's no way you used that much soil (because I can do basic math), and his only response is "I do this every day, this is what it costs." Of course I went over the obvious bs of his situation saying "why would you not give him an estimate", and he responds "How would we give an estimate? We don't know how many bags we will need."
I've never heard such obvious nonsense before in my life, and have been fuming about this the last few hours. I've been trying to call anyone I know in the area to see if they can come help now that the landscapers left and are apparently coming back in the morning. I told my parents to not give these idiots another cent, and tell them that they'll call the police if they come back and demand more money.
Is this a common scam? I know for a fact after talking to a contractor friend that in California doing over $500 of unlicensed work is illegal, and I would assume that trying to extort money out of the elderly would also be illegal, but I've never heard of something so brazenly ridiculous as this. Obviously without a contract these guys have no leg to stand on, but they still were able to basically extort $2000 out of my parents for what I am assuming is not much work and not much material costs (its hard for me to know since I wasn't there).
Update 1:
So of course these guys didn't show up this morning to collect the rest of the money, which I expected.
I was able to gather some more info from my mom about what these guys supposedly did... The 600 sqft areas that they cleaned up, they basically just removed weeds, cleared some of the top soil, and replaced it with new soil.
My dad claims they said they replaced 4 inches of dirt, and my mom says they told her 2 inches, but neither actually saw them do any of it, they just saw the end result (which they say looks decent). However I suspect what they actually did was just clear the weeds, maybe cleared a very small amount of dirt from the top and placed a few bags of new dirt on top. They also said that they were told this was special soil that kills weeds (whatever the fuck that means). The neighbor said they saw only 10 or so bags of dirt actually being moved, but they didn't watch them the whole time.
I'm waiting on pictures from my mom to actually see what they did, but in the mean time I left a message with KEYT (Santa Barbara's news station affiliate) to let them know that my parents got scammed by someone that their San Diego affiliate reported on a few months ago (see one of the comments below that posted the video of this exact scam). Hopefully I'll hear back from them so they can investigate.
Update 2:
I finally got my mom to send me pictures of the finished product, and its somehow worse than I could have imagined. They clearly just cleared some weeds and dumped some planter soil on top of what was already there. This is so egregious I can't even believe it. All of the plants, stones, edges, bushes, etc.. were all there before and looked exactly like this. The only difference is they removed the weeds, trimmed the bushes near the street and dumped this soil down. According to my mom she says its about 2 inches of whatever soil they put down, but i don't believe it.
Even crazier is apparently my mom asked them to put bark down, not soil. So they didn't even do what they were supposed to do.
