Attorney General Ashley Moody is taking aim at a local landscaping company that targeted Villagers with false promises and incomplete work.
Moody said that since July 2017, Service Smart (which also went by other names) has solicited Villagers through “unpermitted door-to-door home solicitation sales, offering a variety of landscaping and pest control services.”
The company has cheated its customers out of more than $100,000, Moody said.
“Service Smart Inc., Service Smart Management Inc., Good Neighbor Landscape Inc. and Good Neighbor Service Management Inc., a/k/a Good Neighbor Services (“Service Smart”), and its owners and managers, Kenneth Wayne Smith, Aaron Paul Gaines and Roy Blackburn allegedly failed to provide certain services and misrepresented the quality and timing of services provided, resulting in more than $118,000 in lost consumer funds,” she said in a news release.
Smith, who served as a lead sales person for Service Smart, was arrested in 2019 for writing bad checks.
According to the investigation, the Attorney General’s Office received more than 125 complaints against Service Smart for misrepresentation of services and services not rendered—with more than 120 of the complaints being filed by seniors and military service members.
Service Smart allegedly misrepresented to consumers the timeline, schedule or frequency of landscaping and pest control services through deceptive contracts, flyers, invoices or sales pitches. Furthermore, Service Smart used the same deceitful sales tactics to falsely convey product quality or type of vegetation used on projects.
