AlarmForce I paid for ten months of no-service; Toronto, Ontario

About a week before my wife and I have left for a two-and-a-half months vacation, I called Alarm Force to notify them about the duration of our absence from home and the dates of our departure (19sep08) and arrival (04dec08). Alarm Force requires a two-day notice. As required, I told them who has an access to our house and their phone number. Apparently, my notification was promptly forgotten. On or about the 05oct08 (In a minute, I shall explain my doubts about the exact date) our phone line went dead. The wireless phone-trouble notification device in our house alerted Alarm Force. They despatched two girls of a total age of 30 as our next-door neighbour described them to investigate. The girls parked their car on our driveway, walked around the house to the back yard, left a yellow notice in the mail-box (For whom? For the thieves, in case they doubt our absence?) and left. I keep that yellow notice. The date on the notice is 11/05/05. They visited in October 2008, not in November.

My contact recalls that Alarm Force called his home phone to say that there was a false alarm in our house; so they checked and everything is OK, not to worry. According to his recollection, he got that call not later than about two weeks after our departure. This is why I claim above that the girls came 05oct08 or thereabout. I disregard the year of the claimed date, which is 2005. According to the yellow notice, the girls DISARMED the system upon arrival and ARMED it upon departure. In reality, they did not enter our house. To do so, they would have to ask my contact to take them in, but they did not. Were they to enter the house, they would discover that while the alarm system works properly, there is no monitoring and the main box and the wireless box both keep talking unintelligible nonsense. Were they to raise the phone receiver, they would discover that the phone line is dead. At that point, they would have to use their cell phone to call Bell and complain. Bell would fix the phone line and the monitoring would resume. However, the girls did not do anything like that. Since that date, the two boxes kept on talking unintelligible nonsense and Alarm Force continued being unaware (Why? The wireless unit was supposed to alert them of the telephone line being dead.) about the fact that our house is not monitored. Our contact lady was coming to our house about every two weeks to look around and water our plants. Each time, she was disarming the alarm upon arrival and arming it upon departure. The two boxes, one in my office upstairs and the other in the basement, kept on loudly talking unintelligible nonsense.

About a month later, this lady needed to leave for London, UK due to a family emergency. Fearing that her husband would neglect our plants, she transferred our garage opener (we lock out our entrance door solidly upon departure) to another friend of ours. This friend visited our house a few times. Each time, he disarmed the alarm upon arrival and armed it upon departure. The two boxes continued talking their unintelligible nonsense loudly. Neither this friend, nor the lady before him, needed to use our phone. Hence, they were unaware of the phone line being dead. The situation continued until the evening of 04dec08, when our friend brought us from the airport home. Upon arrival, the two boxes greeted us with their unintelligible nonsense. I disarmed the alarm and we entered. As the boxes continued talking, I armed the alarm and stayed in the house. The alarm went off. I set beside the box in the basement and expected to hear the after-alarm request to say the secret code. However, after the alarm ended, there was no after-alarm request. The two boxes continued their incessant talk. We were tired and went to bed. However, to fall asleep while the boxes kept talking proved impossible. Hence, I dressed up. I reached for the electrical supplies of the two boxes and disconnected them. The reason I dressed up was that I expected a police visit soon after I disconnect the boxes. Yet all was quiet. After about 20 minutes I went back to bed. Next morning, I raised the phone receiver to call Alarm Force. I discovered that the phone line was dead. I immediately used my cell phone to call Bell. Bell promised to check our connection.

A few minutes later, without ringing, our phone started talking numbers: 1,2,3,4. Apparently, a technician was doing some work. Soon after, the line came alive. However, I did not call Alarm Force until the 14dec08. I was giving them time to discover that their monitoring equipment is disconnected. That did not happen though. They did not discover. When I finally called Alarm Force on the 14dec08, I complained and explained what has happened and what I did about that. I told them that I have no intention to reconnect their monitoring and requested a two months refund for the time they left my home without monitoring while we were away. The responding lady said that she cannot resolve my complaint. She said that her supervisor is busy at the moment. She will notify her and the supervisor will call me back. The supervisor did call me back, indeed The date of that call was 02jan09, two weeks after my call. That call came in within the hour after I called Master Card and asked them not to honour an Alarm Force request for their monthly fee. The thing is that my Master Card expired in November 2008; hence I was sure I do not have to respond to Alarm Force written request (I keep it.) for my Master Card automatic payments, because Alarm Force will not be able to receive my monthly payment for December 2008 anyway.

I was wrong. Despite the fact that my Master Card expired, Alarm Force did receive their payment for December 2008. This is why I called Master Card on the 02jan09 and asked them to stop the payments. Within the hour, I received a call from Alarm Force, allegedly regarding my 14dec08 call about absence of monitoring. Prompt response, indeed, wouldnt you say. By then, my house has had no monitoring for three months: for two and a half months due to flawed Alarm Force equipment and irresponsible behaviour of the response girls, and half-a-month due to sheer negligence of their personnel. This is why, before the Alarm Force delivered to me the attached request to pay for monitoring for eight months + equipment + fees for a total of $543.88, I was asking Alarm Force to refund me for only the three paid months during which Alarm Force left my house without monitoring.

Upon refund, I would return their equipment. Now, however, after their monthly harassments with bills and threatening calls, I was asking the Court to award me $1,000.00 to compensate for harassment, time to proceed with this application and related expenses in addition to the three-months worth of no-monitoring, as well as for the cost of the ADT equipment installation that would not be needed were Alarm Force doing their job. When Alarm Force notified me in June 2009 that my payments will be transferred to a collecting agency, while being fully aware of the fact that ADT is doing the monitoring of my home since January 2009, I decided that enough is enough. I delivered to their office more worth of removed equipment than they installed to begin with to the satisfaction of their technician. (ADT installers removed some expensive parts of my before-monitoring alarm system, which Alarm Force has utilized. I also returned the box that allegedly monitors my telephone line. I bought this box from Alarm Force for an additional $99.00). I paid, as they requested, for monitoring until July, 2009, because I returned the equipment after the middle of June. And another $21.00 for who knows what. I was asking the Court to award me $1,000.00 to compensate for Alarm Force harassment, time to proceed with this application and its Small Court Claims fee and related expenses + $102.33 that I paid for the three-months worth of no-monitoring in 2008 + $272.88 that I paid for eight months of no-monitoring in 2009 + $21.00 that I paid for who knows what + $1,055.56 I paid for ADT equipment installation that replaced the Alarm Force equipment. The total of my request was $2,451.77. At the 20jan10 prior-to-Court-Hearing Reconciliation Meeting, with a judge and two AlarmForce representatives present, they offered me $500 for my trouble. I, on my part, offered them to pay $2,451.77 until end of January, 2010. They did not pay me anything. That removed my offer and gave me the moral right to complain anywhere. In addition to my several complaints on websites that offer space for complaints, I filed a complaint with Better Business Bureau.

I was appalled to see that AlarmForce enjoys the highest A+ rating there. Looks like I am the first one to complain to BBB about AlarmForce. I see the major problem with AlarmForce in the fact that their contract (which the salesman made sure I do not read before I sign it and I got my chance to read it only after I returned the equipment back to the AlarmForce office) is illegal, due to the circumstance that it imparts on a customer an obligation to pay for installation and service (from one complaint on the internet I learned that payments start from the date of signing, not from the date of alleged start of monitoring, hence the customer complains that he was charged twice for the first month and was not refunded), but does not impart any obligation on AlarmForce: AlarmForce promises to install at their leisure; equipment has to be neither necessarily new, nor does it have to work properly; AlarmForce is not obligated to make sure they discover neither an absence of telephone connection, nor hydro supply at the monitored home; their personnel does not have to be well trained and knowledgeable and it is OK if their employees are negligible in doing their jobs. The contract reads like a joke, a sad joke. After a customer signs such a contract, the AlarmForce mousetrap gets him in for four years (they advertise three) and, as worded in paragraph 8 of the contract, The Customer cannot cancel this Agreement. Were this contract challenged in Court, it would be thrown out of Court as a Slave Contract. Apparently, this contract was not challenged in Court of Law.