In an Airport meet and greet scam, Katie and John had just returned from some winter sun in Jordan when, at 10pm on a Tuesday, they found themselves standing outside Gatwick airport, frantically calling the firm they had entrusted their car keys to a week earlier.
It had been an amazing holiday but the two junior doctors were eager to get home: John had a shift early the next morning.
When they called 365 Valet, the company which had offered the meet and greet parking service, they say they were told that that an employee would return with their vehicle within five minutes.
By midnight, their car still hadn’t arrived. They went in search of it and, though it was supposed to have been driven off the short-stay car park where they’d left it, the car was still there—and they had accrued £450 worth of parking charges.
The keys, though, were with 365 Valet. They had called the company “over twenty times in those two hours,” John said: “eventually the company admitted that they couldn’t find their keys, and claimed they didn’t have time to look for them.” Outstanding service!
Unsurprisingly the couple were beginning to worry. They’d used a meet-and-greet car parking service in the past and it had been smooth and easy. Maybe they were just unlucky this time?
Around a month later, another unfortunate chap named Frank was also standing outside Gatwick at midnight with his family, making a call to the firm that had picked up his car a week earlier, just before he and his wife and children boarded a flight to Marrakech.
Frank was not happy when he had dropped the car off: he says:
“The man who met him hadn’t presented him with any paperwork and had been cagey about having his photo taken with the car and keys.”
But he was rushing to get a flight an convinced himself that everything would be fine. He was, as it turned out, never to see his car again.
365 Valet would eventually, reluctantly admit that the car had been stolen by a disgruntled former employee.
Airport meet and greet scam.
