A moving experience

>> East-End movers dupe customers and flee with downpayments

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Three silver-haired East-End tax accountants in an office on Adam Street got to know many of the victims of the sudden and mysterious disappearance of the movers next door. "I figure that 400 of their customers came in asking questions here over the past few days," says one.

"There were so many coming around that the police had to come," says the second.

The third jerks his thumb toward the recently-vacated neighbouring premises of Déménagement Nationale. "Those guys must've bagged $100,000," he says. A woman whose adjacent store sells used clothes for five bucks a bag says, "The movers seemed like decent people. I would have hired them." Minutes later on the sidewalk a middle-aged passerby sporting a soft cast on his forearm stops briefly to tell of his moving nightmare. "They took my $150 deposit to move me to Laval and then disappeared. One of them had a shaved head and a Harley, I figure they might be bikers. I don't go chasing after those types."

Déménagement Nationale, apparently a fly-by-night operation that took hefty deposits for moves that were never made, at least had the good manners to warn their dupes by mailing them a photocopied note explaining that the move wasn't going to happen. The unsigned letter claimed that the company had gone bankrupt after its trucks had been vandalized. But neighbours, familiar with the vehicles, heard nothing of any vandalism. And records have shown no evidence of an official bankruptcy. Management has proven impossible to locate.

"I should have known. I called them on June 8 and they told me they still had lots of space for July 1," says Addolorata Bizzoco, who lost her $250 deposit on a move that would have cost her $548. She says that 10 customers were busy signing moving contracts when she visited the office. "The worst is that they duped a lot of poor people. It cost me a lot but I'll live and learn," she says.

Edwin Yee, another victim of the phantom movers, lost $250 of the $550 he fronted for a move within the Plateau. "I felt it was strange that the deposit was so high. They explained that in the past they had taken lower deposits and people had moved at the last minute. I felt that I wouldn't get the service without paying it and I felt kind of desperate," says Yee.

A Transport Commission official says that movers pulling sneaky midnight moves on their clients remain uncommon. "Mostly we get complaints about service, breakage of materials or about insurance that wasn't good," says Leonce Girard.

And Déménagement Nationale wasn't among the 35,000 businesses on the registers of the provincial Consumers' Protection office according to rep Jean Jacques Préaux, who recommends that those hiring movers never pay more than 10 percent on a deposit.

Most of the victims of the moving fraud apparently found alternate means to get their boxes hauled. But Holly Lam, a university student who forked over $300 of the $500 required to relocate her family from the Plateau to Ahuntsic has yet to get a move on. "I noticed the moving company claimed to have some license number. It all looked pretty official," she says. "It's hard to relieve that feeling that you've been duped, that you're a complete idiot."