Confessions of a computer repairman

When your PC breaks down – assuming you can’t fix it yourself – the first port of call is often a professional repairer who might just be able to rescue that vital data, restore the operating system without losing your photos, or get that graphics card working again.

Whether it’s an independent trader plucked from the Yellow Pages, or a local odd-jobber advertising on a card in the newsagents, however, it’s difficult to distinguish between the true professionals and fly-by-night rogues.

High-street companies have been widely criticised for a lack of technical knowledge that can leave customers frustrated, while a handful of private repair outfits appear to be actively ripping-off end users.

It’s important that end users choose a repairman or company carefully

“These people are in a minority, but they give the industry a bad name,” said Dan Hand, chairman of the Association of Computer Repair Business Owners (ACRBO). “Whether it’s people going through customer files, looking in their documents, or failing to actually install hardware that customers have paid for – it does go on. It’s important that end users choose a repairman or company carefully.”

According to people working within the industry, finding a repairman is a lottery, with no qualifications required to start trading and precious little comeback if things go wrong.

Even established repair shops can employ a slew of tricks to inflate their profits, and although they’re the exception rather than the rule, the tales of woe listed here will highlight the scams to watch out for.

We’re not naming and shaming rogue traders in this article, but examining the tricks of the trade and downright cons that have been revealed to us by repairmen. The stories highlight both the difficulty in finding someone trustworthy, and how hard it can be to recognise that a scam has even been committed.

All the stories mentioned here have been witnessed or participated in by repairmen talking to PC Pro, or by the professionals left to pick up the pieces when the original cowboy left a computer in a worse state than when it arrived. Some names have been changed to protect our sources.

Here today, gone tomorrow

Given that many computer repairmen advertise their services on lamppost flyers with nothing more than a mobile phone number, they can be difficult to track down if anything goes wrong. We’ve spoken to repairmen who have explained how this works in practice, and it can be a costly lesson to learn for the unsuspecting victims.

“Sure, we can fix this, but we’ll need to take it down to the workshop to fit the replacement parts or run tests,” is the basic modus operandi. “We’ll have it back to you by the weekend.”

In reality, this is code for “thanks for the computer, we’ll look forward to selling it at the car boot sale this weekend”. The repair company that explained this wheeze to us said it found out about the con when a frantic victim phoned up asking whether it had collected his computer. When the client had phoned all the repairmen in the phone book, he realised the hardware was gone for good.

“You should never use someone purely through a mobile number,” said John Finlay, who runs the computer shop Fixnsell in Blackpool. “There was a spate of it around here, with several machines picked up in a couple of weeks.”

The “beyond repair” bluff

Unscrupulous repair shops thrive on the fact that most customers have limited knowledge of what’s happening inside their computer, and that’s especially true if the machine won’t even power up.

“We had a girl come into the shop last week and she was really upset that her laptop was what one of our rivals described as a ‘write-off’,” said independent shop owner Ian Sharples.

“She’d taken it in there because there was a problem booting and it wasn’t powering up. The guy explained to her that the motherboard was knackered and it really wasn’t worth repairing.”

The original trader offered her £40 for the “scrappage value” on the laptop and asked whether she would like to buy a new model. Fortunately, the woman smelt a rat and sought a second opinion.

“She thought it was dodgy and she was right,” said Sharples. “It turned out to be a problem with the power supply unit that we fixed for about a fiver, but the computer was nearly new, worth £400-500, so he could have cleaned up.”

The memory game

We’ve spoken to repair shops that have been contacted by disgruntled customers from other shops who, clutching a sheaf of receipts for work undertaken and hardware installed, aren’t happy that the expected performance boost hasn’t materialised or has lasted only a short time.

“The trick,” one repair shop owner told us, “is to give the computer a good tune-up to clear any adware or malware that might be slowing down the machine; clean out the cache; perform a spring clean – anything that makes the machine much faster.

No-one’s going to notice if there’s 3GB or 2GB of RAM in there if it works faster when it comes back from repair, and they’ll probably never look

“There’s no real need to actually install the strips of RAM that the client has paid for, because they probably won’t know where to look for it. No-one’s going to notice if there’s 3GB or 2GB of RAM in there if it works faster when it comes back from repair, and they’ll probably never look.”

The hostage situation

Although the repairmen we spoke to stressed the importance of setting an upfront price with customers, they also explained that rogue outfits are more than happy to zealously undertake costly repair work, even if the final price outweighs the value of the computer.

The result, when the customer goes back to collect the computer, is chronic “bill shock”. Since the work has been done as per agreement, the cowboys claim they can withhold the machine until payment has been made.

“We hear about it a lot, mostly with motherboards or laptop screens that are installed at an inflated price – perhaps up to £180 instead of about £100,” said Finlay. “As the work has been done, the customer effectively has to pay for it, even if it costs more than the laptop is worth. People should agree a price upfront and get in touch if there are any high charges, but not everyone does.”

The practice isn’t always so expensive, but can still feel like a violation to consumers who are bullied into paying something for nothing.

“A colleague had a faulty laptop and took it to his local independent PC shop,” PC Pro reader Ged told us. “It offered to diagnose it for £20, so he agreed. He returned to find the laptop in pieces, with a diagnosis of ‘the motherboard is knackered’. The kicker was that the guy wanted another £20 to put it back together again! Unbelievable.”

The blank screen of opportunity

If plumbers have a reputation for tooth-sucking and price inflation, they could soon be challenged by rogue traders that make as much as possible from each computer call-out.

Graphics card connectors can easily work loose over time, and the result is dramatic – at least to the non-technical user. A blank screen is a pretty convincing sign of a defunct computer, and a consumer faced with an apparently dead machine will be expecting to pay a hefty price to get it up and running again. Not all customers fall for the trick, however.

“I was out on a job with someone as part of training for a company I worked with,” said Toby from Scotland. “When we got there it was really obvious what the problem was – nothing more serious than the graphics card having worked loose in the AGP slot. By the time my colleague had finished huffing and puffing, he’d almost convinced the customer that he needed a new monitor and a graphics card too – and the bill would be £200. I don’t know whether he paid or went elsewhere, because I left the company after a week.”

Loose hard disk cables represent another golden opportunity, according to a PC Pro reader who used to work for an unscrupulous repair firm.

“When we opened the box up it was obvious that a SATA cable had simply come loose from the hard drive, but they didn’t want to just reconnect it as that would have meant a low bill,” said Raymond, a student from the Midlands, who left the shop after a week in disgust at the practices taking place.

“In the end, they charged them something like £100 for a new hard drive and another charge for transferring the data from the old drive, even though they had neither installed a new drive nor transferred any files.”

Virus cold-callers

Sometimes, you find the scammers – other times, they find you. As PC Pro reported last year, there is a computer repair con that can strike end users before they even know they have a problem, which, of course, they don’t.

The con is both fiendishly clever and seemingly unstoppable. The fraudster cold-calls the customer and explains that Microsoft has detected a virus on their PC, then invites them to download remote-assistance software.

As the “customer” stares in panic at a screen full of indecipherable code flitting across their display, the caller assures the customer they can make the virus vanish – but first they request payment of anything up to £200.

Although we broke the story in March 2010, leading to widespread coverage in the mainstream media, consumers are still falling for the scam, with new operators setting up every few weeks.

“I fell victim to a company that cold-called and fed me all the patter about viruses, and because I’m a computer Luddite they were phenomenally persuasive,” reported reader Cougar J. “I ended up going for their ‘Diamond’ option at £199.99. Now I’m petrified because I gave them all my credit card details and they also accessed my computer virtually.”



Hot-kit shuffle

Unscrupulous traders rely on the average user’s ignorance of the inside of their computer. Repair professionals told us that most people who take their machines to be repaired are unlikely to ever look inside their PC, and even less likely to poke around inside a laptop.

“I’ve seen it when a customer wants something doing on a machine and sometimes they supply a receipt or specs list from when they bought the computer, which can help us with diagnosis,” said David, who runs a mobile repair service in Yorkshire.

“When you open it up and start comparing what you can see with what’s on the paperwork, they don’t match. It’s usually an expensive component like a graphics card that isn’t what it was supposed to be.

“Either they were supplied with kit that was inferior to what they asked for or, when it has been in for repair somewhere, it’s been swapped for something that’s much cheaper, so the dealer can sell the other one for clear profit. A lot of people over-spec their PCs, and it’s easy to see whether there are a lot of games on the hard drive that might suggest the customer would notice if the graphics performance dropped.”

The snoop patrol

As PC Pro exposed back in 2009, there’s a history of maintenance staff taking liberties with your hard drive when it’s out of your sight.

During an investigation we undertook with Sky News, we uncovered how workers in one repair shop fixed a problem before rifling through the hard drive, downloading intimate holiday snaps from a file marked “Secret”. Later they tried to access an online bank account with fake password details left on the laptop.

You’d hope it was a one-off, but this isn’t the case according to PC Pro readers, who have confirmed it’s common practice. “I know a company that does this everyday,” posted reader Wacky17 on the original story. “I know this to be a fact because I work for this company and am fed up with how it works.”


A spokesperson for ACRBO confirmed it’s a problem, but what is scary is that one of our interviewees reported that this was taken for granted when he was on work experience.

“It’s one of the first things people did when we were looking at a laptop,” said Raymond from the Midlands. “They’d go through documents, mostly looking for porn, pictures and videos. It was like a standard operating procedure.”

Phantom repairs

Rogue technicians might well charge exaggerated prices for exaggerated repairs, but given half a chance they will make up an issue solely to justify a hefty bill.

“I’ve seen all sorts as I run a quality PC repair service myself,” said PC Pro reader Steve Towers. “Lately, I’ve followed the work of a large repair chain that charged a nice little old lady with a computer fault £90 to fix it. The problem was that the machine kept beeping when she turned it on. The cure? Well that was simple – lifting off the book that was sat on the keyboard pinning down a key! And no, they didn’t tell her this is what they had done to fix it.”

There are a dozen variations on this theme, often involving expensive repair bills for a job that should take only a couple of minutes. “We hear about simple jobs racking up prices a lot, and often it’s something as simple as a BIOS setting that the customer has changed, which means the computer won’t boot properly,” said Finlay.

“By the time the cowboy has finished, he’s either charged £100 for a fresh installation (which he probably won’t do), or he’s sold them a new motherboard, which he makes a commission on and charges to install.”

The price gouge

The variation in cost between what’s reasonable and what’s achievable is another potential bugbear, because a customer will often have no idea how long the work has really taken, or what it entailed in the first place. Once the machine is in the repair shop, end users become easy targets of the oldest trick in the book – the price gouge.

Most shops charge between £200 and £300 to repair this and take up to two weeks, but really it’s about an hour’s work and I’d charge £60

“I’ve seen many dodgy scams, but the one that really burns me up, and brought about the end of my professional relationship with one shop, was when a 72-year-old lady brought in an older-model laptop with a broken power jack,” one reader told us. “It’s very common. Most shops charge between £200 and £300 to repair this and take up to two weeks, but really it’s about an hour’s work and I’d charge £60.

“I finished the repair in less than an hour and asked the manager if I should call the customer and tell her that it was done. He said no, that he’d call her the following week. On the following Monday afternoon, I stood there in horror as I watched this man tell the elderly woman that he’d personally spent five-and-a-half hours repairing her laptop, which was why he was charging her – get this – £385.

“He turned to me and asked out loud ‘Ain’t that right?’ Well I am sorry, but if I will not lie to you, I will not lie for you either, and that was the end of that job.”

The Windows wiper

Finding the root of a problem within an operating system can be a time-consuming process, especially if the technician isn’t properly qualified. Up against a ticking clock – especially given that customers don’t want to pay large bills for labour – too often the default option for repairmen is to format the hard drive and reinstall Windows.

While this might be the most cost-effective way of solving a problem, customers are unlikely to have backed up their files if they haven’t been informed of the wipe, especially if the machine won’t boot.

We’re not suggesting that there aren’t occasions when a complete reinstall is necessary, but repair cowboys seem too quick to wipe, either to save time or because they’re not expert enough to solve the underlying problem.

“A recent customer asked if we could recover data from her hard drive. She had used a so-called technician who didn’t know how to repair her fault,” said David, from Yorkshire. “Taking the easy way out, he reformatted her hard drive – without even getting her okay first. He charged her £50 and disappeared into the sunset. She then desperately needed me to recover photos of her kids when they were younger and also recent photos taken at a wedding.”

Not only does the Windows wipe cause data loss, there’s no guarantee that the reinstalled version is even genuine, which can land users in trouble with Microsoft.

“It’s surprising how often we have machines brought in to us after a computer cowboy has installed an illegal copy of Windows,” said David. “These tend to work fine for a short period, until Microsoft catches them or a bug surfaces.”

The insurance fiddle

If a computer shop is dodgy then it won’t discriminate about who it rips off, and insurance companies can end up paying out for new computers when older machines can be salvaged.

Using a tactic ripped straight out of the scrap-metal dealers’ almanac, computer fixers collude with customers so that both the repair shop and client gain, but only at the expense of the insurer. “There was a big electrical storm during the night once, and a few people’s PCs had been affected via the modem,” said Timothy Benn, who used to work in a computer retail and repair shop in Sussex.

“It was generally only the modem and motherboard that was affected, so the PC didn’t work, but it would still have a lot of usable bits, and the manager would collude with the customer to take part in an insurance scam.

“He created a document saying the PC would need to be completely replaced, which the customer could give to the insurance company. The customer could then get a free new PC with the insurance money, and the bloke in the shop would get to keep the working parts of the old PC, which were often worth a few bob. No-one lost out, except the insurance company, but it was dodgy.”

Business shortcuts

Consumers and insurers aren’t the only potential victims of cowboys: business call-out engineers have been known to cut corners, too, with potentially much more damaging results.

At some point, some cowboy thought ‘Oh, sod it, I’ll just use this screw, it will do.’ They were either incompetent or lazy

Business and home IT consultant Drew Graham was horrified to see the condition in which someone left a business-critical server, explaining that the shortcuts taken by another technician could have been ruinous.
“I took a server apart to install a USB 2 card, and when I set it back up the hard drive was making a rattling sound,” he said.

“When I stripped it down again, I found that the single, non-redundant IDE hard drive was secured to its mounting with two screws that were too small to grip it! A hard drive spins around at 5,400rpm in this case and therefore constantly vibrates. Having badly fitted screws means they could wiggle out, dumping the hard drive onto the floor with a fatal thump. Not only that, but a vibrating hard drive can shake itself to bits.

“At some point, some cowboy thought ‘Oh, sod it, I’ll just use this screw, it will do.’ They were either incompetent or lazy.”

The untrained “expert”

Although the thrust of most examples here involves gratuitous profiteering or deliberately dodgy practices, there’s also a groundswell of animosity against technical ineptitude, which can be equally damaging to a consumer’s computer.

“The number of times I’ve been in a tech-support queue in a shop and had to give advice to the people working in the shop is amazing,” said PC Pro reader Pete. “I remember a guy bringing in an Iomega Zip drive that had broken with an important disk inside it. The tech-support guy proceeded to try to remove the disk – with a pair of pliers!

“I advised him to insert a paperclip into the eject hole. So he started poking a paper clip into the power connector. I corrected him again and he was shocked at how easy it was. I pointed out that it was described on the first page of the manual.”

Another former technician, this time working in a call centre for a major retailer, explained that he’d been hired for the company – which sold cheap PCs and made its money from premium-rate technical support and extended warranties – with practically no assessment of his abilities.

“It hired me via an agency, and although there was a basic assessment of whether I had any technical skills, it wasn’t relevant to the work I was doing or the machines I was supposed to be supporting,” said Benn.

We could only conclude that the previous technician had pirated the program from the customer’s computer

“The company provided no training whatsoever, and we didn’t even have the same operating system as the machines we were supposed to be advising on. We usually suggested a sort of factory reset, and then hoped we didn’t get them back when they called back if it still wasn’t working.”

Licence-key lifting

While your machine is with a repairman, he has access to everything on it, including the applications installed and, possibly, licence certificate information. This means that an unscrupulous trader could copy program files and use them elsewhere, landing the end user in hot water, or resulting in blocked software updates.

“We went to a house that had been using a different mobile repair technician, and the guy wanted help with his expensive antivirus program,” said Finlay. “Despite having paid up for the updates, the antivirus program was now blocked and the security company said it had stopped the service because the software had been used on more than one machine.

“Nobody else had access to his PC and he certainly hadn’t given his registration code to anyone, so we could only conclude that the previous technician had pirated the program from the customer’s computer.”