Sarah was alone in her flat with her three-month-old baby when a man put a card machine in her face and demanded she pay £2,209. A few hours earlier Sarah, 30, had been for a walk with her daughter when it dawned on her that she had left her keys at home. She did what most people would do in the same situation: search Google for a nearby locksmith. “I had a screaming baby, so I needed someone to quickly let me in,” she says.
Sarah came across a seemingly legitimate company, near the top of the search results, which was sponsored. The company’s website said prices started at £45 and claimed they had received “4,500-plus five-star reviews and counting”, so she called them. When the locksmith arrived, Sarah says, he “seemed pleasant and relatively quiet” at first. After examining her lock, however, he told her it was a high-security one and the only way to get inside was to drill it open. He broke his way in and changed the lock before delivering another blow: he had accidentally damaged the internal mechanism, which also needed replacing. After Sarah got inside and placed her baby on a changing mat, the locksmith told her the price: £2,209.
At this point, he put the card machine in Sarah’s face and “got quite pushy”, repeating to her: “Come on, you pay me.” She says he “wasn’t threatening”, but, being in the flat alone with her baby, she paid up, fearing he could turn aggressive. After he left, it dawned on her that she had fallen victim to a scam. “I felt a bit sick,” she says. “He probably thought: ‘Here’s a mum with a baby in a stressful situation, I could charge what I like.’” Despite generally being “clued-up on scams”, she says her situation shows “it could literally happen to anyone”.
Like Sarah, I also thought I’d be able to spot a fleecer straight away. But I was also conned by a locksmith scammer. It was over the May bank holiday weekend. While I was out and about, I realised my wallet (which also held my keys) had fallen out of my pocket. I retraced my steps to try to find it, then went to my mum’s house to see if she had a spare key. She didn’t. I was rapidly running out of options. And so I did something I’d never done before: I decided to call a locksmith.
My mum warned me as I Googled that she had heard about dodgy locksmiths on the news, but I batted away her concerns. I found one, listed right at the top of the search results, with an average rating of 4.7 stars based on fewer than 20 reviews. That will do, I thought. When I called up, I was told it could cost anywhere between £45 and £80 – which I made them confirm. The man on the phone assured me it wouldn’t cost any more. I rushed home and waited.
The locksmith arrived an hour later, peered at my lock and shook his head. Apparently, it would be a tough one to crack and would cost £250 to open. There must be some mistake, I said; I was told £80 would be the maximum. After some rambling about different types of locks, I called the company and spoke to the same man who had given me the quote. Furious, I explained this wasn’t the agreed price and that if they had known there was a possibility of it being higher, this should have been communicated before someone was sent out (the locksmith was insisting there was a £45 call-out fee regardless).
The man at the end of the line dropped the price to £200, then £145. It was getting late and the thought of waiting around even longer was unappealing, so I told the locksmith to go ahead. After lots of drilling, my door was finally open and I handed over the cash. Before he left, I noticed something was missing – something to put my key into. But I was flustered and he was eager to go, so I let him. I was left with a door without a lock, and an urgent need to book another locksmith to get one fitted.
The UK is facing an epidemic of locksmith scams. According to the Master Locksmiths Association (MLA), the number of scams reported to the organisation rose by 147% between January and March 2026 compared with the same period in 2025. It is part of a wider trend – the number of complaints relating to rogue locksmiths rose 66% from 2021 to 2025.
The main swindle being carried out is called a 49-er, a “bait-and-switch” scam whereby a locksmith advertises or quotes a low price, say £49, but after being called out charges hundreds or thousands of pounds. “We have seen some very frightening amounts,” says Steffan George, the managing director of the MLA, which works with the police and Neighbourhood Watch groups. The industry is unregulated, meaning “anybody can call themselves a locksmith, buy locksmith tools and advertise their services”, says George.
One reason scams are becoming more prevalent is search engines. Whereas once you might have looked up reputable locksmiths in the phone directory, Google is now the first port of call for many people looking for services. But reputable firms aren’t always at the top of search results. According to the MLA, many locksmith scammers operate out of big call centres, where workers are dispatched en masse across a city or region, but these operations often list themselves on Google as smaller, local firms to boost search.
Paying for Google Ads, the company’s advertising platform, can often be enough to place a company high up and make them more visible to potential customers. The more a company is willing to pay, the higher its chances of being in a position that Google itself describes as “generally above the top organic results”.
Google told the Guardian it has “strict ads policies that govern the types of ads and advertisers we allow on our platforms”. The company says it blocked or removed 602 million ads associated with scams in 2025. The website Sarah used had 21 sponsored ads on Google. After I contacted Google, these ads were removed for “violating” its policies. As George says, a search engine result for a locksmith “is not an indication of how good a company is, it’s an indication of how much money they’re spending with Google”.
George believes these rogue firms deliberately make costs spiral. “As soon as they drill the lock, then it’s going to need to be replaced, because your property is now insecure. They can then overcharge you for fitting a new lock, too,” he says.
This is the predicament in which Pat Gilks’s son found himself. Gilks, 60, who works for a charity, was on holiday in Scotland when he received a call from his son saying he had locked himself out of the family home in London and called a locksmith. “We asked him how much it cost, at which point there was a stony silence,” he says. The total was £3,300. Gilks had the only appropriate two-word response: “Holy shit.” Like Sarah and me, Gilks’s son had found the locksmith on Google. He had repeatedly tried to ask for a price beforehand, a question that was evaded with a vague “it depends what needs to be done”.
The breakdown of the costs was “absolutely outrageous”, says Gilks. The emergency call-out fee was £280. Gaining access to the property was another £229. For parts alone, the cost of a “high-security lock” was £465, a replacement door handle £420 and an internal mechanism £800. On top of this, labour to remove and install everything was £630, with VAT adding £568. A replacement high-security lock from a reputable locksmith normally costs about £25 to £70, while a door handle is £30 to £60; prices for an internal mechanism range from £40 to £180. “He more or less just added a zero at the end of everything,” says Gilks.
Gilks later contacted a legitimate locksmith who said he would have charged about £190 to £240, including the call-out fee, labour and materials. In the legitimate locksmith’s opinion, the door handle and internal mechanism didn’t need to be replaced. Gilks has tried to contact the scamming locksmith, but all he had to work with was a handwritten invoice that listed a dead website with an expired domain.
Sarah also sought to get in touch with her scammer. “I called up the number that I first contacted and the guy immediately put the phone down on me,” she says. Later, she managed to get through to the company to complain about being “horrifically overcharged,” to which they responded: “We don’t care about your complaint,” before hanging up.
There is little formal recourse for consumers taken in by rogue locksmiths and criminal prosecutions are incredibly rare. The Department for Business and Trade says those affected should “contact Citizens Advice, who can refer complaints on to Trading Standards for appropriate action”, which could include a fine.
George says we may never know the scale of the problem, as many victims simply accept the loss, worrying about reprisals from scammers who hold sensitive information about them. “There may be a fear factor – those who are too worried to say anything because the so-called locksmith knows where they live,” he says, particularly because they target “older couples or lone females who are less likely to question and fight back”.
The MLA says it is illegal for locksmiths to be checked by the standard-level Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) assessment, which flags spent convictions, because this is reserved for certain jobs, such as those in security, veterinary care, law and roles involving children. “It makes absolutely no sense,” says George.
So, what can be done? It’s worth pointing out that Google has taken action in other countries. Locksmiths have been banned from advertising on the search engine in Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain to “reduce fraud”. In the US and Canada, locksmiths need to be verified to advertise on Google. As for the UK, Google says it “continues to invest significant resources to stop bad actors” and is “constantly evaluating and updating our policies and improving our technology”.
The UK government is understood to be examining how other countries have clamped down on rogue locksmiths advertising on Google. While the Online Safety Act 2023 includes provisions intended to clamp down on fraudulent advertisements, plug-ins falsely declaring thousands of five-star reviews with fake testimonies can be easily slotted on to a website. The MLA has launched a parliamentary petition championing legislation that would require search engines to verify emergency trade advertisers, including locksmiths, before allowing paid ads.
Rogue locksmiths aren’t just a costly liability to consumers; they also affect everyone working in the trade. After realising my door had no lock, I called up Islington Locksmiths, a legitimate trader, a few minutes shy of midnight, to ask whether I had been scammed. Kumas Naroei, who runs the company, said it sounded like a classic 49-er and that costs could have soared if I had let the locksmith complete the job. He asked for a picture of the lock, which needed to be replaced, and gave me a price of £165. He said he probably would have charged £250 to £300 for the previous day’s job, telling me the price beforehand.
The next morning, Naroei came to my property. While replacing my lock, he told me he has been face to face with many a rogue locksmith. Usually, he says, the person from the scam call centre will ask for a customer’s address before providing a very cheap quote and sending someone out, whether this was agreed to or not. Naroei has often turned up to a job after getting the go-ahead and been greeted by a scam locksmith working away, with the customer assuming they were from Naroei’s company.
“It’s really bad for us, because we get into arguments with the other locksmiths,” he says. Sometimes, if they haven’t started drilling, he’ll advise customers to pay the call-out fee and cancel the job, because they’re going to end up being charged more. If the customer decides to stick with the rogue locksmith, Naroei says he’ll stick around to “make sure that they do the job” and dispute what they say, especially if they’re pushing for unnecessary destructive entry. “I put them under pressure. I don’t like people taking advantage of vulnerable customers. I’ll make sure they do the job even if I’m not getting paid,” he says. He advises customers to ask a locksmith for their ID and to find out what company they work for when they turn up.
As he handed me the keys to my newly fitted lock, having fixed the work of the scammer who conned me, Naroei said: “We’ve got a vendetta against these guys.”
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