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Secure Home Warranty, a home warranty company catering to an American audience has been put out of business in 2018, leaving disgruntled customers who paid for a home warranty policy and got nothing in return. A recent development in the case was that a company named LeadCreations.com, LLC was awarded a judgment against Secure Home Warranty, LLC (Broward County Case Number: CACE17014723) for Fraud and subsequently obtained its domain name.
The home warranty industry is not extremely popular among homeowners in the USA, but based on reporting from Frontdoor Inc., a publicly traded company owning the biggest brand name in this industry, it is estimated that at least 3% of all American households use either home warranty company to cover them.
A home warranty is actually a service agreement between the issuer of the policy and the customer. It dictates that upon paying a monthly premium ranging between $20 and $100, depending on the contents of the house and the age of its systems, the customer is eligible for a professional repair service sent to him within a limited time frame, and that the issuer of the policy will cover all associated costs (up to a certain limit).
The concept is quite similar to that of a home insurance but unlike insurances, it is not as tightly regulated and thus, some of the smaller companies that run out of business leave clients short for their money and without any protection.
What Secure Home Warranty did in fact was taking money from its customer month by month, and year by year, but not providing the services that it has guaranteed to provide. Based on reviews from Yelp, the company has been unavailable for long periods of time even throughout early 2017, and as a whole did not provide the service it was supposed to provide.
One client says: “We purchased a home warranty through this company in January 2017. Our air conditioner stopped working today. We tried to contact this company without success….”, while another stated several months before it has completely shut down that “…Wow it is so sad this company is still scamming people! I get emails daily from people who have been victims of their fraud!”.
Now, these clients will have to go through the bureaucratic hoops to retain some of their money back, and in all likeliness, are not going to be compensated for their losses and damages. There are 30+ large providers offering home warranty policies in 2019, and although the majority of them are probably just serving their clients and are not ill-intentioned like Secure Home Warranty was, the American audience requires some stronger supervision in this industry.
