Ariana Express Moving & Storage

10 october 2017, 17:39

I don't know how to say this strongly enough. Ariana is not really a moving company. It is a scam operation that uses "moving company" as its cover. We contracted with them to move my daughter from New York City to Virginia, with a couple of weeks of storage in between. Went through the whole business of agreeing to a "binding contract" which is just part of the scam. The movers were supposed to show up in the early afternoon Saturday. As the time approached, she started to receive a series of shifting phone calls explaining that A. G. was not going to handle the job and sub-contracted to someone else. In one call, a truck had broken down. In another, they were overbooked. In another, they didn't work on Saturdays. Then she started receiving phone calls from a guy named Eddy from Ariana Movers. (I don't actually believe these are separate companies, they are two ends of the same scam.) Eddy is basically impossible to understand over the phone. He had one excuse after another, finally showing up at her apartment at 1:00 AM Sunday morning. That is when the demands for money, in cash, began. More stairs than agreed to (not true). He claimed he charges more than A. G. movers. etc. etc. etc. Fortunately my daughter had a lot of support, and said no over and over again. The deal was a deposit of $112 up front, the rest on delivery. Finally, after multiple threats to leave her stuff on the NYC sidewalk, Eddy gave up and took her stuff and placed it in storage. It was not clear at that point whether he or AG movers would deliver it to Virginia. When we called AG movers the next day they professed total ignorance. Once we agreed to take delivery from Eddy and Ariana, they claimed, A. G. Movers no longer had anything to do with it.At this point we had no idea whether we would ever see our stuff again. After a week or so we started to hear from Eddy. He would deliver our stuff to Virginia on August 2, as contracted. He would be there between 10-11 AM. Fine. We scheduled a day off and drove to where the delivery was scheduled. No Eddy. Finally we hear from him that he would be there at 630 PM. He showed up at 830, and of course instantly demanded full payment in cash before he would unload the truck. He also demanded more than he was owed, neglecting the deposit we had already paid. When we refused he called "the office", and guess what, it was A. G. Movers, the people who had originally sub-contracted the job to him and presumably lost interest. A very unpleasant woman threatened us over the phone, telling us we would not receive our things unless we paid cash before the truck was unloaded. We simply refused, we were ready at this point to let them have the stuff, and we knew perfectly well that once they had our money the demands would simply escalate. Finally they gave up and began to unload the truck. Then halfway through, Eddy confronted me saying, you give me half the money now! I said no, everything stopped for a while again, until they finally gave up and went back to unloading.Finally everything was done except one item, which was presumably in the back of the truck. Eddy said he didn't want to unload the whole truck to get it. The item frankly wasn't worth much, so we agreed to give him $50 less than the contracted amount, paid him in cash, and he finally left.The way this operation works is, they get you to sign a "contract" then begin a long process of trying to swindle you out of more money than you agreed to. We only got out the other side because, 1) My daughter's stuff wasn't all that valuable in the first place, making it relatively easy to refuse them, and 2) We had a lot of people working together on our side, making it somewhat easier to resist all of the hard-sell scam tactics the companies threw at us.Whatever you do don't use these companies! You were warned.

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