Buyer Resources
The "Duct Cleaning" Facebook Scam
A breakdown of how the "duct cleaning" Facebook scam works, in addition to examples of what to watch for.
Abstract
The posts always follow the same format and have similar photos. They start by saying they're a family business and looking for customers, with some tidbit about not being in the greatest financial situation. Then they go into detail on why duct cleaning is necessary for your home. Finally, they dangle the hook: They're having a limited-time promotion to drum up new business. Great! All you have to do is PM them to get started!
The problem is, that the person you are messaging on Facebook is not who is going to be showing up at your house. These accounts are all fake, using fictitious names and profile pictures stolen from across the internet.
Examples
Breakdown
Looking into the account more, you’ll start to see that the same accounts are liking and commenting on all their posts, and if you dive further into those liking accounts you’ll see the same thing for all their respective posts. These fake likes and comments are used to build trust with prospective customers and give the appearance of being real users who are active members of the local community.
In reality, the people behind the accounts do not live anywhere near North America. They pretend to be local duct cleaning companies but there is never any official business information listed that can be used to check reviews on Google. This is because they are not a real business. Some posts may include a local phone number but those can easily be obtained without living in the area using a VoIP service or similar. The person you are messaging on Facebook is actually based in Pakistan (Source: Pleasant Green) and is essentially a middleman . Their only job is spamming these “duct cleaning” posts across Facebook buy/sell groups in Canada, the USA, and Australia, and collecting leads (information) from potential customers.
So who actually shows up to do the job?
Once someone messages about duct cleaning from one of the many spam posts, the middleman collects relevant information from the customer and posts it in a Facebook group for duct cleaning leads (Source: Facebook). They include postal/zip code, price quoted and date requested in their post looking for “local technicians” available to complete the job. We use quotes because there is no vetting of the qualifications of these “local technicians”, their experience in the industry or the equipment they’ll be using. The person who shows up to do the duct cleaning is just whoever on the internet replies to the post the quickest. It could very well be a totally random, fly-by-night person with little experience. There is physically no way of knowing who will show up.
The average cost for a whole home duct cleaning service from a legitimate and reputable business is between $450 and $1000 (Source: EPA). This calls into question how the sub-$200 prices being advertised on Facebook are economically viable for their “business”. The answer is, that they aren’t. They need to make up that extra revenue somehow, and there are two common ways they achieve this.
The first is by doing what’s called a “blow and go”. An average duct cleaning service takes between three and five hours to complete (Source: Planet Duct). In a “blow and go”, the entire service takes less than an hour (keeping labour costs low) and just involves attaching a vacuum and superficially shooting some compressed air into the vents (Source: CBC Marketplace). Without specialized tools like a video snake, it’s very difficult for the average homeowner to inspect the completed work and confirm their ducts have been fully cleaned, so it's easy for “local technicians” to say they’ve done the service and the homeowner is none the wiser.
The second way they make up the extra revenue is by upselling you somewhere along the way (Source: NADCA). This could happen when they arrive, claiming there are more vents to be done than expected, or after the cleaning has finished, where they claim that they found mould and recommend that you purchase additional cleaning services from them to get rid of it. Whatever the excuse is, they’re just making up reasons to charge you more money and increase their bottom line above what you originally agreed to.
Once the work has been completed and you’ve paid the “local technician”, they will send a commission to the Facebook middleman in Pakistan that sent them your information. The Pakistani middlemen earn up to 30% of the total cost of the job. The average monthly wage in Pakistan is only around $87 USD per month (Source: CEIC), so with the average value of a duct cleaning lead resulting in a $100 to $150 job, the commission from the spam posts can be extremely lucrative. This is why you see so many of these posts on Facebook spammed so often by so many different accounts. The commissions are high relative to the monthly average salary, new Facebook accounts are free and easy to make, barrier to entry is low as duct cleaning doesn't require government regulated licenses to perform, and its easy to scare homeowners who don't know any better into booking a duct cleaning after reading all the buzzwords and health warnings they put in their posts. Unlike your front yard after the local lawn guy finishes mowing, ducts are hard to access and inspect without expensive tools like a snake camera, so it's difficult for a homeowner to verify if the "local technicians" actually did anything. It’s basically a gold rush for spammers now. They're all jumping on the trend to get their share of the profits, and the posts will only stop when the money no longer becomes worth the effort it takes for them to post.
History and geography
This Facebook duct cleaning scam is the internet-evolved version of the more common duct cleaning telemarketing phone scam which has already plagued homeowners for close to two decades. The earliest references we can find to the Facebook scam date back to 2017 (Source: Reddit), so we estimate it started sometime around then and became more widespread once they realized how lucrative it was. The scam specifically targets users of Facebook groups in Canada, the USA and Australia (Source: Facebook).
How to protect yourself
Don’t book duct cleaning on Facebook. Use Google to search for reputable duct cleaning businesses near you, and check their reviews and years of operation. The more reviews they have, the better. Also, ask if they will use a snake camera after the service has been completed to give you visual evidence your ducts have been cleaned. Legit businesses have nothing to hide.
Updated: 2024-08-01
First published: 2024-05-19
