London is awash with men with vans

This blog is to help people avoid the hassles i had when I moved using a van and man service I found on Gumtree. Cheap removal can is attractive but here is a cautionary tale.

My own stupid fault. I was pushed for time and didn't have that much to move.

Saturday afternoon along comes this ex-post office red van with acouple of guys. Give them credit their efficiency was contrary to the first impression they gave.

Everything was treated with care. I jumped a cab and went to the new address to meet them. An hour later they had not appeared. The phone number I had went straight through to voice mail.

3 hours later I contacted the Police but without a name (other than Viktor and he was Polish I think) I had nothing to give to them in the way of information to help track them down.

The Policeman then told me I had been had in one the fastest growing scams in the capital. In the space of an hour they had loaded and disappeared with about £8k worth my worldly possessions.

2 days later i went and bought a replacement armchair. this time I went for a company who seems to be well established - Icanhire.com/manandvan. They turned up pretty well on time and charged me a reasonable price.

A week later I went shopping again to replace my plasma. This time taxivans were not available so I booked with local-taxivans.co.uk. they never turned up and I was stuck with a 42" plasma and no way of getting it home. So I took it back into the store and got picked up the following day by Icanhire who wer about 30 minutes late but at least they turned up and did'nt steal my stuff.

So the lesson I learnt was

Via Gumtree van and men very dodgy

local-taxivans.co.uk - don''t know if they are dodgy or not but they let me down

Icanhire.com/vanandman turned up and on the whole gave me good service at a reasonable price.

So send your experiences and lets get rid of the ***** who are either crooks or unreliable.