TheMovingBuddy

Good question! The biggest one would be when a mover comes to your house, loads the goods into his truck, then tells you, you have more than the estimate and its going to cost more. You can then protest, but many of them will say it will cost the same price to offload as the entire move. The big part of the scam here is that they are supposed to have you sign the estimate PRIOR to loading so they can't just change it up all the sudden, but many people don't know this.

Haha great question! In general the worst moving situations are hostage ones. In these cases, the carrier will basically hostage your goods and refuse to deliver unless you pay more money. For me personally the most interesting situations are when going to Arizona. In Arizona (it's the only state), the weights and measure department that moving fraud extremely seriously (it's run by a great guy named JJ). I had a situation where there was rogue mover who refused to deliver the goods unless paid more. I helped coach the customer to say that he would pay so that the moving company would bring the goods to the customer. What the moving company didn't know was that once it showed up, the Arizona weights and measure department sprung on them with the cops and finding several violations with the moving company and escorted them to reweigh the goods (finding that the initial price was even too much). In terms of just straight up worst, there have been hostage situations where people refuse to deliver goods, and just dump them in storage units and we have to try to find them (sometimes its difficult/impossible especially if the company just mysteriously goes out of business).

Congrats on owning a transport company and trying to do the right thing man! The company I worked at was actually very large so they created this consumer advocacy department to kinda give back and help clean up the industry. I think the best way is just making sure that people are educated more before they move. I think one of the big things is people just don't know that much about moving because it's close to a once in a life time thing, and even if they did want to find out there is not much information, especially easy to understand and access information (especially for the older generation). It's hard to fix the first part, getting people more interested in an in frequent event, but working on the second part, providing easy to access information is what I am trying to do. Hopefully when people have to move in the future they can google easily how to move and learn the steps so they can find reputable companies like your own!

Thank you! I am glad you enjoyed it (it's my first time trying to make a website so it's a bit rough on the edges).

And yes, you are very keen to notice that! In these types of operations it can be almost like slight of hand. Much of these things come down to being technical differences where experts can take advantage of novices.

In regards to the site, the booklet is an excellent resource and a good amount can be found in it! The only drawback is it is a little text heavy and easy to tire the less ambitious. My hope was to make it a little bit more accessible to people, by adding pictures to kind of walk you through it. If you are curious about really learning the ins and outs of what you can do the best thing would be to look at the statute that covers this ECFR 375.503. This will help you learn basically everything. https://ecfr.io/Title-49/cfr375_main

Good question! There are two ways to do it. First, is to try to go with an AMSA mover. AMSA is the American Moving and Storage Association, so movers there will tend to be more reputable and have to adhere to additional standards. This DOES NOT mean that they are necessarily good, but it just reduces the chance of them being bad. Second, is the hard work. Background checking the company, you will want to go to the FMCSA site. There you want to see if they first have all they have all the basics (moving authority, insurance), then you want to check their complaints to see what type of problems they have. Delays are normal, but huge red flags hostage situations. A few could just be random people but if there are a lot and the company hasnt been around in a while thats a bad sign.