Desi Movers Inc. Theives

Desi Movers Inc. – Post Three

Extortion, Fraud, Thieves

On June 27, 2008 we moved our residence from (a temporary accommodation a Semi- Detached house) 3726 Bloomington Crescent, Mississauga, Ontario L5M 0A2 to 3153 Tacc Drive, Mississauga, ON L5M 0B6. (Detached home). For our move we engaged this moving company called “Desi Movers Inc. out of Scarborough, Ontario (No details of address, Phone # (416) 889 8107) a decision which will always remain as the most harrowing experience of our life.

On June 24th I spoke with Mr. Jay, as figured in the advertisement in Can India (who claimed himself to be the owner of the company) and again we reconfirmed our booking and rates that were offered to us ($ 65 per hour for a 28 foot truck with 3 men) with them on the 26th June and again on June 27th at 9 Am to ensure the movers show up at our house at the scheduled time of 10 AM.

As promised they showed up around 10.15 Am with three men and can’t confirm if the truck was exact 28 feet (guess it must have been close to that). As soon they reached our residence first thing they did was to pick up a quarrel with my next door neighbor by driving the truck in their yard and messing the grass.

The moving started with loading our main expensive leather couches and immediately after loading the couches the driver of the truck (Mr. Moses) presented a contract to my wife stating that they need to have the document signed before they can do any further loading and asked her to initial the so called contract. Seizing the opportunity of seeing no males at home decided to pressurize two ladies who were at home (my wife and my mother-in-law) the driver demanded $ 200 be given to him as advance before loading our belongings. Hoping that they will not waste time in loading my wife paid them $ 200 as demanded. After another 15 minutes or so the driver again demanded another $ 300 be paid. By the time I reached home and he said that he has received instructions from his owner Mr. Jay that he must collect additional $ 300 before they can load further which we again paid them. It wouldn’t stop at that even before one fourth our belongings were loaded they demanded more payments an additional amount of $ 400 and they all stopped working, and we ended up paying a total of $ 900 before most of the things got loaded.

The drive to our new home was about 3 Km and when they reached our door step they wouldn’t start unloading the goods. After about 20 minutes, the driver (Moses) came in with an invoice showing a total of $ 4203.50. We argued for about 45 minutes and my wife in meantime also called the police and they said they would not interfere in this matter as this is a civil case. In meantime they started threatening us stating they will have to take the belongings to a bonded warehouse and it could take over $ 5000 to clear goods from the bonded warehouse, etc. The demand was they receive complete payment of $ 4203.50 be received immediately wanted the payment can be received only by cash and not by Credit card or any other mode. This created additional problem as we did not have so much cash on us and had to rush my wife to banks to withdraw funds from different banks as our limits for daily withdrawal of cash would permit withdrawal of such huge sum of money.

In meantime they drove away the truck away from the house to end of the street (about 300 meters away which created additional tension as the truck was no longer in our sight. The hustling for payment continued at this point two other helpers to the driver also joined the party saying they have to go and they won’t be able to unload unless we make the payments immediately. Pressuring from all corners this in addition to managing our elderly parents who were in deep shock at the behavior of the movers, and my wife going thru the stress of also managing our young son. She decided to drop our son at one of our friends place so that he is away from this utmost traumatizing situation. In addition to all these we had the deadline of handing over our temporary accommodation back to the builders before end of the day. It was almost 3 PM when the unloading had still not started and we had still quite a lot of things at our house, which were to be cleaned up before 6 PM. On one hand we had to deal with these thugs and on the other hand we had to complete the move before end of the day and to top it all, no support coming from the law enforcement agency created additional trauma.

Looking at all these we had no option but to pay off the movers the ransom payment (I would like to describe only that way). All that we managed was reduce the ransom payment from $ 4203.50 to $ 3800. We paid $ 3800 with a hope at least the job will be done.

Though everything that was loaded in the truck was unloaded but barring couple items most of our things were dropped at the foray itself. Even little things they moved they handled it so carelessly and resulting in minor damages to the furniture and scratches and dents to the flooring and walls.

The contract that my wife had initialed was never handed over to us and the driver got into the truck promising he would give us copy and suddenly sped away so rapidly. We are yet to get over the shock of dealing with these thugs and sadly the whole experience of enjoying our new home has been overwhelmed by this shocking experience. – Venkat Ramaseshan