Complaints

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• Initial Complaint

  Date:02/22/2023

  Type:Service or Repair Issues
  Status:

  AnsweredMore info

  Complaint statuses

  Resolved:

  The complainant verified the issue was resolved to their satisfaction.

  Unresolved:

  The business responded to the dispute but failed to make a good faith effort to resolve it.

  Answered:

  The business addressed the issues within the complaint, but the consumer either a) did not accept the response, OR b) did not notify BBB as to their satisfaction.

  Unanswered:

  The business failed to respond to the dispute.

  Unpursuable:

  BBB is unable to locate the business.

  Advanta Clean did remediation services for ** in February of 2022. They pressured me into signing their contract with fear tactics, stating I needed to sign or they couldnt start work. And if wait, the damage will get worse and insurance may not cover it. I didnt want to sign nor did I understand what was going on. Then I only received the signed page of the contract They entered my house didnt wear masks or booties on their shoes didnt explain anything. I was stressed from the damage already and had no idea what the process was. When I said insurance was covering, the team at my house said and emphasized . This is an insurance claim smiles. They didnt complete the job the floors were still wet to the moisture meter in my master bedroom closet. My contractor checked it a couple weeks even after they were done. The floor was many layers of sub floor Once my contractor finished in the basement and came upstairs to work on the main source of the leak there was mold growing in several walls and the floor had to be completely removed and replaced the moisture caused mold. Costing me above and beyond what insurance was willing to pay. Insurance and myself tried to contact them for months after and didnt hear from them until September. No response. They refused to work with insurance They would claim they were at my house working, I would come home on my lunch they were not there. After work not there. In their reports they claimed they put down plastic on the carpets and the only time they did that was the day they removed they left. They billed for hours they didnt work supplies they didnt use. They ripped out walls that didnt need to be. Causing way more cost to myself and insurance than would have been otherwise. Damage to electrical panel. Didnt hear from them after the 23rd of September again ghosted. Then I got an email saying pay or be sued basically. Didnt get an invoice till I requested over an over. They said insurance has to pay the total.

  Business Response

  Date: 03/10/2023

  There is a lot of false information here in an attempt to discredit the work we did and not pay the bill in our opinion. I won't go into great detail and provide all the evidence and documentation we have as that will be provided to the court. I will say that we have photo documentation and dry logs (which we cannot alter) that show that the structure was dry when the project was finished and there was no visible mold. It appears every time we get an email or message from the homeowner, we get a little different story and new accusations which have never been brought to our attention before.
  She mentioned the electrical panel being damaged, but that was never brought up until we asked to be paid for our work. We asked for some sort of documentation or evidence that the electrical panel was damaged or that we caused it, but she ignored that. We've been doing this work for quite a while and have never damaged a building's electrical system due to equipment overload.
  She claims that her entire bathroom floor was wet, and mold was found weeks after the project was complete, but we have evidence showing that only one very small area in the bathroom floor (approximately 2 sq ft) was even wet to begin with,and evidence it was dry when the project was complete. If the floor was wet after we left, she must have had another water leak and that's a different issue that wouldn't be our responsibility. We can prove the floor and walls were all dry when we left, and if the structure was dry, mold cannot grow.

  
  She claims that we ripped out walls that didn't need to be. We have photos of mold growing on the drywall and we removed the drywall as the industry standard mandates. However, the wall was originally constructed without studs which left us no choice but to remove more drywall than normal due to safety concerns (we didn't want the rest of drywall falling due to lack of structural support).

  
  She claims that we billed for hours that we were not onsite, and she would show up and no one was there. We do bill for time spent traveling to and from the jobsite, but other than that, we have GPS tracking of our vehicles that proves we were at the jobsite or enroute to and from the jobsite for all the hours we bill. 

  
  As far as communication goes, we kept communications going throughout the project and the homeowner didn't make any complaints that weren't addressed while the project was going on. We have emails that show that the owner received the bill as soon as it and all the documentation was complied. We do admit that the communications after the job was complete were poor, but there's a very compelling reason for this. Our person who does the billing and handles communications with insurance worked remotely and was dealing with cancer. We knew she had cancer at the time, but she understated how sick she was and assured us that she was able to keep up with the work she had. Well, it turns out she was very sick and ending up passing away a few months later. Had we known that she was unable to do her job, we would have stepped in and communicated better. I gained access to her email later and found some emails from a third-party review service that went unanswered. However, we typically don't negotiate with these third-party review companies because their sole purpose it to reduce the amount of the bill despite evidence and standards that backup the work that was done. I did not find any emails from the insured and if she had a problem contacting us, she never tried to call the office or project manager with these concerns of poor workmanship. We take these kinds of complaints seriously and work to address them as soon as we are aware.

  
  The short of this matter is, we did the job correctly and well and not been paid.We learned that the insurance company did pay the homeowner about $10k for our portion of the job, but the homeowner has not paid us a dime. This might be considered theft of services or even insurance fraud, but I'm not a lawyer.When we asked to be paid, she suddenly had a list of problems that try to convince us that we did a poor job and should not be paid. We have solid evidence that shows otherwise. We have sent this matter to our attorney and will be filing a lawsuit.  

  Customer Answer

  Date: 03/19/2023

   
  Complaint: 19446180
  
  I am rejecting this response because: I did try and contact this company many times and received no contact back and so did my insurance adjuster. I never received an invoice from them after asking several times. They didn't even know how sick their woman handling the claims was; how in the world would they know who did and didn't contact them. There was an obvious breakdown in communication between the departments. 

  Once we were able to connect, I told ADVANTA clean that my insurance adjuster is refusing to pay the amount they are asking for and he stated they have to pay to get your home in preexisting conditions not to worry that was their job, or something to that effect, I have the emails/ that states that.  Insurance paid part to me because they could not get a hold of ADVANTA CLEAN and neither could I. Ended up using it on the extra repairs needed to the upstairs due to the lack of complete work by ADVANTA CLEAN. The first time I received and invoice was when he threatened to *** me, and they doubled the amount the insurance adjuster paid as well as added in charges for paying late. Well, no one could get a hold of the person in charge of the claims on their end at all to negotiate or pay something. We are willing to negotiate an amount as we had to put money out of our own pocket for the damage that Advanta clean had done, and I also have pictures and a contractor to prove it. Insurance paid some but not all and I had to come up with the rest for construction to keep moving forward. 

  I have a report where they stated they would need to bring in a power source due to the is*** they were having with the power tripping the breakers. I do not recall any question about proof of damage. They obviously knew there was an is*** if they stated in a report, they needed to bring in a power source but never did and it just wore down my electrical system; with the continual overload anything after they had left would trip my breakers which it did not do before they came in.

  They were trying to take the insurance company for a ride once they knew insurance was paying. I agree they should get something I guess since they sort of tried to dry it out and probably did get some of it dry, but not double what the insurance was paying and not even what the insurance paid. They money insurance paid went back into my house or I would still be setting without a bathroom or walls in it.  The extra money was not planned for to repair; the damaged due to them not doing a complete job.

  Through all the stress I ended up losing my job and definitely didn't have the extra to clean up after the so-called professionals. I asked for mediation and got no response. I never even got a copy of my contract I signed which I was scare tactic into. I had asked a couple time when they were here on sight working and received nothing from the professional team that bounced in without masks and didn't lay down any plastic to keep from damaging or dirtying the carpets they walked all over. COVID is real both my husband and I got it and my husband was in ICU for 6 days and almost died. They just rudely bounced in and started doing whatever they do because they did not even consider informing me what was going on. I wasn't familiar with this process. This was all new and horribly stressful to me. Back to the contract - I was scared into signing, I never did get a copy, all I have is a screen shot of my signature, convenient! My husband wasn't happy that i signed something without him here since the house is mostly in his name and I told him they said I had to so they can get stated or our insurance might not pay.

  You would get a different scenario each time you reached out because there was so so much that happened that it was ever evolving and I couldn't follow the money trails between fighting with my insurance to pay the cost of things in that period of time which had tripled, answering questions and paying for stuff ordering stuff to try and save cost and obviously not doing a very good job at working full time in the process. Full time meaning 10 to 12 hours a day 7-to 7:30 or 8:00 each day.

  Sure, you can get a dry report depending on where you placed the reading meter. Obviously was not in my adjoining room closet or take into consideration the number of layers of subfloors that was in the bathroom which they knew about because one of the workers told me there were many layers at least 5.

  They did not in any way do $20,000 dollars' worth of work maybe damage. This whole situation was and has been overwhelming from coming home to gates being open and dogs getting out and living in destruction trying not to be taken advantage of due to my lack of knowledge in this matter. As you can tell by my all over the place thoughts this is exactly why you would get different is***s at different times of communication. I would write them down in a state of frenzy and I have severe anxiety and thoughts don't always flow effectively in the manner I would like them too. And I remember pieces after the fact. 

  We didn't get back to the bathroom for a few weeks because the contractor started his work downstairs and most of the time it was just him working alone because my insurance didn't want to pay real cost of anything in reconstructing my damaged house. So he worked alone because he could not afford to hire a team with the cost of materials being in the covid skyrocket price jacking period. 

  How can a company have someone do their books and not know she was that sick and not know she wasn't returning any calls? Seems unbelievable to me. One would think they would have someone in helping her to insure she wasn't overwhelmed, and business was taken care of. She was negotiating with the adjuster and then it all stopped and my adjuster reached out to someone else on the team and got no response, over and over.

  
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