About Virginia Locksmith Bill HB462

Locksmith Legislation in the State of Virginia has been long overdue. For years, citizens of the State of Virginia may have assumed that a license would be required for someone to work as a locksmith. For decades, many legitimate, real locksmiths have proudly served the citizens of Virginia, and took it upon themselves to properly train themselves, register their trade name with the appropriate authorities, obtain a Trader's License and obtain liability insurance before adverstising or taking on even one job as a locksmith company. Incredibly, there has never before been any requirement from the State of Virginia that a criminal background investigation be performed before an individual could work as a locksmith. Virginia Locksmiths Legislation has been sought for many years by the most professional locksmiths in Virginia, and we are proud to be part of the effort that has seen success in the passing of House Bill 462 in the Virginia General Assembly.

Over the past few years thousands of citizens in the entire nation have become victims of phony locksmiths. What is a phony locksmith? Phony for using fake addresses to appear anywhere and everywhere a citizen could expect to have need for locksmith services. Phony for using unsuspecting citizen's addresses to create thousands of locksmith listings in the printed directories and on the internet, in a blatant effort to monopolize the mechanisms by which consumers can expect to be able to find a locksmith, such as 411, the white pages, the yellowpages, and of course, the countless number of search engines and directories on the internet. With the phony locksmith companies using so many addresses, most users of a search engine like Google are highly likely to become a victim of one of the thousands of phony locksmith companies in Virginia alone, because they have purposely placed themselves with a phony address in any area they choose, without regard for the safety of the citizen that lives at that address. What has been especially troubling about the obvious methods used to monopolize the market for emergency locksmith service is that the dispatchers will always quote a low service fee over the phone and send an unqualified individual who has had little or no training as a locksmith, and yet will pretend that your lock has to be broken in order to gain entry to your home or business. If you are locked out of your car, they will quote a substantially lower price over the phone than most reputable locksmith companies, and yet charge an exorbitant fee for the labor involved in opening your car, home, or business, instead of quoting a flat fee like most experienced locksmiths would. What a citizen should be able to assume is that a locksmith can pick their lock without damaging it, and unfortunately, the scammers using this phony locksmith marketing strategy know full well that they can make more money from you, by either pretending that they cannot pick the lock, or even worse yet, not even being capable of picking any lock. We hope that Locksmith Legislation, with Virginia House Bill 462, will lay the foundation for an aggressive enforement action by the citizens of the State of Virginia, legitimate locksmiths, and law enforcement alike.

So what can you do to protect yourself from ever having a phony locksmith experience? First, make sure your address is not being used by one of these illegal companies. We cannot overstate the risk to yourself and your family that you face when anyone, worse yet a criminal, purposely deceives the public by using your address. You have the right to your own address, and you should never allow anyone else to use it. Even if there is no Locksmith Police to go around and lock up individuals who are deceiving the public, we can take action at many different levels to enforce this Locksmith Legislation. At Baldino's, we want to know who you are and that you want to do your part to stop others from using your address without your permission. We will file, on your behalf, complaints from any and all individuals who have become victims of phony locksmith companies, and we will work with you to let you know what has been done to remove that listing from any directory, especially on the internet. When we tell a citizen that we know their address is being used by a phony locksmith company, we are often met with a lack of concern and this is not the attitude you should take at all! Take the time to look up your own address on Google or your local printed directory and see if it is being used by a phony locksmith company!

The second thing you can do to protect yourself from ever having a phony locksmith experience is to establish a working relationship with a company you trust, and keep their phone number handy, or even better yet, program their number into your cel phone. In this day and age, your cel phone is almost always still with you even when you forget your keys. More importantly, be aware that one of the worst practices used by these phony locksmith companies is to hijack reputable companies' directory listings to purposely confuse you into thinking you are calling the reputable locksmith company you know and trust. They repeatedly use reputable locksmith companies' names, verbatim, on the internet, and in directories like SuperPages.com or YellowPages.com., with impunity, and those two directories in particular seem to be doing little or nothing about this particular problem. A reputable company deserves to maintain its good reputation without fear of some irresponsible internet search engine not taking steps to thwart the blatant hijacking of internet listings and use of duplicate trade names of companies you know and trust. Ask for someone you know at the company, and reference your location by use of landmarks. A dispatcher in Florida or New York, which is where many of these phony locksmith phone numbers forward to, will probably not know where your local grocery store is, whereas a truly local locksmith will, and you can tell when they are not truly local. Call the directory again, if you need to, until you are connected with someone that you can tell is actually local to your area, and not pretending to be. If you know you had service by someone by name, do not accept a response from a dispatcher trained to lie to you that "we have a lot of people working here" when you request that person by name. Any reputable company is proud to send the same technician out to provide service for you, and in most cases will allow direct communication between that licensed, trained locksmith technician and yourself, to allay any concerns that the individual you have at your home or business has had a complete background check and is not a criminal illegal alien.

We have provided, free of charge to any locksmith listed in our directory, what we believe is a complete listing of any company doing business legally as a locksmith in the State of Virginia. In essence, we are becoming the Locksmith Police of our own profession. Even if you don't use Baldino's for your locksmith service, we want you to be able to connect to a reputable company and do everything we can to keep customers from wasting their money on phony locksmiths. If you are a locksmith in the State of Virginia and do not see your website link in our directory, feel free to contact us and we will add it after we verify your information. If you are looking for a Baldinos Locksmith, feel free to find your closest Baldino's location below and give us a call to help bring safety and security back to the forefront of what real locksmiths do.