cindy n.

After repeated calls from Service Magic asking us to sign up for their service, I finally agreed to give it a try in January 2011. They were offering no sign up fees, the only requirement was that we have valid liability insurance. The way the service works is there is a charge for every contractor that receives a "lead" and I was told that each lead would go to three contractors in our area. Leads that were determined to be "exact match leads" were charged a much higher rate. On February 14th, we received our first and only lead and it turned out to be an "exact match". I called the customer immediately and again tried to contact him later but he never returned my calls. I called SM to report the issue and told them I did not expect to be charged. They sent the customer an e-mail and I received a reply that he had found someone else. I told SM this was not going to work for me and that I had plenty of work on my own anyway so I wanted to cancel. One week later, I was searching out various location on the web and found they had hijacked my Yahoo Local ad where we had great customer reviews dating much earlier than my January 7th sign up date. They had changed my phone number to their toll free number and changed my website link to their own. I have since found other places where I had my company registered that they had changed my original information. I could not believe this had happened. I still have not gotten the situation totally corrected. I have spent several hours on the phone with Yahoo, had to agree to pay a monthly fee so no one can get into my ad again and am still waiting for them to try to get our company customer reviews from the site SM hijacked to my paid for submission. I wonder how many other companies they do this to and they don't even know it. I suppose if you are a new company and do not have good web presence, SM may be a good match for that company but not a company who already has a good business. I am still not sure how they managed to do what they have done, can not believe it is legal and can not imagine how much business we have lost as a result