Complaint Review: Total Home Services and Solutions - Dallas Texas

My name is John Hill and I have a company called The Good Contractors List.  Recently we interviewed Total Home Services and Solutions and did a background check on who we thought was the owner.  Turns out it was just a worker that Russell Jones had act like an owner.  Unfortunately, we didn't catch it and just totally dropped the ball on this one.  Even if things look great on the front end, we realize that it will take working with the contractor to know if he is as good as he appears.  We do a thorough follow up process on our contractors by calling back every homeowner to see how things are going, but it still took over a month before we received the feedback we needed to throw up the red flag.  Russell was taking money up front and making excuses why he couldn't start work.  He would lead them on for a few weeks, saying that he was waiting on material or someone was sick or had a funeral, or whatever.  Eventually he stopped returning their calls and we started getting concerned calls from homeowners who trusted us to lead them to a good contractor.  We immediately responded and then went through our system to find every instance someone called Total Home Services and Solutions from our website.  We called everyone back and ended up with a total of 9 people/families that Russel either did really shoddy work, left in the middle of the job, or just took their money and never even started the job.  We immediately removed him from our website and tried to get him to return the money.  He of course refused and gave us the name of his "attorney".  We took responsibility and are compensating everyone who was taken advantage of, but Russell Jones is still out there doing business.

Here's the pattern....

He does a great job selling himself and actually is very knowlegable.  He is typically less expensive than most, which obviously made it more attractive since he was backed by The Good Contractors List.  BTW, on his contracts he is calling himself The Best Contractors List and offering a $10,000 guarantee.

He will enter into a contract where he puts TBD (to be determined) as the start date.

He then will have you write a check up front to either himself (Russell Jones) or to someone who works for him (we have copies of the checks and contracts to prove this).  It is never written to Total Home Services and Solutions, Jonesco, or any other business name.

He then begins making excuses why he can't start and then, when the homeowner says they don't want to do business with him, he thinks he can keep the money because "the homeowner won't let me do my work" and "I wrote TBD in the start date. " 

Once there is a contract it becomes a civil matter and nobody he does this to has the money to hire an attorney and sue him only to just spend more money and never collect anyway.  The police can do nothing about it because it is civil instead of criminal.

We have made every attempt to allow Russell Jones to return the money he took up front from our customers before we shared this information.  However, he has absolutely refused to take responsibility and it is our duty to protect other people from him.   Unfortunately, not everyone will read this or do their due diligence before they hire them and more than likely nothing will ever stop him.