APX Alarm | Customer Review: Rather Detailed Account Of APX Sales Methods

This is about APX and is a cautionary tale for anyone who is unfortunate enough to have one of their "Sales" reps (who claim they are not "salesmen") come to your door.

This clean cut young man rang my doorbell and as soon as I opened the door, he started talking a mile a minute, repeating himself dozens of times. First he noted that we had Brinks signs out, although Broadview took them over quite awhile ago. I just haven't put the new signs out. Now Broadview is ADT (a company I intentionally did not want to do business with because the salesman we dealt with was "skeevy" at the very best. "I'm not a sales man," he said, "I'm just in your neighborhood looking good properties where we can get the attention of your neighbors with our "ministry". You're on a corner, and if you let us put our sign in your yard, we can make some money off you. We will give you a free alarm system if you do three things: 1) keep the sign up for three years, 2) let us know if it ever is stolen or a storm blows it away, and 3) never tell your neighbors you got your system for free.

He repeated this spiel several times and then went to trying to scare us by talking about lock bumping and how if someone cut our phone line, our system would not work (which is not true). I told him we don't have a landline and it works just fine. Then he asked about the system, making me very uncomfortable. He kept talking about how they were associated with Honeywell and that all the individual pieces of all systems were manufactured by Honeywell? a comment I have not yet vetted. The mosquitoes were so bad that I finally let him into the foyer, where my husband was listening in. The man then told us that we would get the system for free; it would work with our existing equipment except we would have to change the pads to cellular pads. As we got further into the conversation, he said that as long as we had the sign in the yard, we would get the system for free. Then I asked, "If we had it out there for 20 years, we would never have to pay a dime?" He said, "Yes".

Then he said we would just have to pay the cell phone fee to keep a connection with all the towers in the area, so if one is down, the others still work. That would be just $11 a week. Oh, and there was a $99 activation fee, but we would get extra points for that. We would get 7 points just for having the sign and then 8 more when we paid the activation fee. We could trade these points for parts of the system like control pads, smoke detectors, glass break detectors, motion sensors (rated up to 80 lbs ? so you could leave the motion sensor on even if you had cats ? which we do), and so on. And if we asked for this kind of equipment from our current provider it would cost $397? or was it $365? He said both prices.

I handed the papers he had given me to look at to my husband and moved over to my computer where I typed in APX Alarm Security Systems and found complaints here and at other sites. Really too many to get into here. He claimed they were Better Business Approved, so I went to the BBB site and found they were not accredited. He kept wanting me to go to the APX site, but I told him "No, just as you said people could write whatever they wanted on the internet good or bad, it isn't hard to make up a website and put anything you want on it, including a fraudulent BBB symbol. He started stuttering and stammering and going over his list of things to say, to which I told him "As a matter of fact, *inserted his name here*. If we were to have any break-ins now, I think we could quickly conclude who our first suspect might be". He then started talking about how he had a solicitor's license with the City and how he was just trying to save us money and I told him I think I was done with our conversation. That really got to him and my husband ushered him out.

He started down the street to harass our neighbors and I called the police telling this guy was soliciting a fraudulent product and how they were a scam and how I knew they were a scam and they sent out a car to talk to him. He saw the police cruiser and waited before going up to another house. After it passed, he proceeded back on his journey.