Carin Selin walks carefully across the lawn in the yard outside her brick villa on Lidingö outside Stockholm. She wobbles, supporting herself with her hand on the pile of bricks stacked against the wall. Carin shakes her head and points up to a blue tarp covering part of the roof.
- Yes, that roof was apparently broken, she says ironically.
The tarp and piles are a reminder of what happened one day earlier this fall, when two men in their 50s rang the doorbell.
The men said they came from a roofing company that did work nearby.
- One of them was driving. He came in and offered vienna bread and was very nice.
Over coffee, the men talked to Carin, 86, and her husband Sigge, 87, who has dementia.
Carin says that the men asked if they could take a look at the elderly couple's roof and do a free inspection. When they came down they explained that the roof was in such bad shape that it needed to be fixed. The man said that fortunately the company had workers nearby, as well as scaffolding and materials. That would make the job cheaper.
- We would earn SEK 20,000. But it suddenly became very urgent to make a decision, says Carin Selin, who tells us that the men wanted the spouses to sign an agreement on the same day.
- They talked us over, you could say, says Carin Selin, who signed the agreement with a total cost of SEK 527,000.
Already the day after the visit, the company arrived with scaffolding and materials. Then the workers began to tear down the roof.
After three working days, when the son Gustaf Selin and the other children found out what had happened, they stopped the work and demanded that the agreement be cancelled.
They also hired an inspector to find out if the roof really needed to be torn down. The house was built in 1977 and the roof has not been replaced since then, but the inspection report states that it is "fully functional" and that "the roof tiles close tightly and still have a long life left and that the cardboard and battens are in good condition. There are no signs of leakage."
- It is not the first time this has happened and it is almost only the elderly who are deceived by door knockers like this, says the inspector to DN.
Around 60 square meters of Carin's and Sigge's roof had already been demolished. Roof tiles in good condition had been thrown into a container and many of them had been crushed, while the company threatened with a final invoice for the full amount. The family says that they were contacted by the company's representative, who claimed that the right of withdrawal did not apply. Gustaf Selin describes the people behind the company as threatening.
- They said we made a big mistake that stopped the work, he says.
There is now a dispute over payment and right of withdrawal, while the torn roof must be repaired for SEK 125,000.
The company that the couple Selin hired is called H & K Entreprenad. The company has changed its name several times and has a history of disputes with customers.
Recently, the company has sued an 85-year-old man and is demanding over one million kroner from him. According to the man, three people from H & K Entreprenad visited him at his home and got him to sign an agreement, among other things about roof work. He believes that the work was useless and incorrectly carried out. The representative, lawyer Alexander Raaum, says that his client suffers from dementia and believes that H & K took advantage of an "elderly man's vulnerable situation".
Alexander Raaum says he looked at other targets with H & K Entreprenad and sees a pattern.
- The company's working method is they seek out the elderly, get them to sign and start the work immediately. Then they try to sell the customers more services. The prices are sky high. It is incredibly frivolous action.
In a report to the Swedish Consumer Agency, a couple in their 80s writes that they felt "fundamentally deceived" by the company's salesperson and believe that they paid large sums for improperly performed roof work.
DN finds seven similar cases, where elderly people complain to the General Complaints Board (ARN) about H & K Entreprenad's business methods. Enköpingsposten and the consumer site Byggahus.se have previously told how H & K Entreprenad, then under other names, tricked older customers into replacing well-functioning roofs and invoiced more than promised.
H & K Entreprenad's CEO Alexander Tekle says that they did not deceive the Selin couple and that their roof needed to be renovated.
- The roof is 50 years old and the customer certainly does not feel cheated.
But we have spoken to them and they say they feel cheated about this.
- The guys who were out with the customer have told us that the son and daughter jumped into the case and forbade them to continue, because they thought it was too expensive.
We have seen many examples of your company receiving complaints under other names from elderly people who felt cheated of large costs, or of replacing a functioning roof.
- We have a firm grasp, we had a turnover of 52 million last year and this year we are up to 100 million. We cannot trace the tens of customers who have left reviews on various sites to real customers.
There have been reports to ARN and the Swedish Consumer Agency and you have had and are having disputes with customers.
- We have won all the disputes we have had. And the disputes we had and the ongoing disputes have nothing to do with age.
But it is often older customers who feel cheated. Is your business model to cheat the elderly?
- I think it's a stupid question.
Alexander Tekle interrupts the interview and asks DN to return via email. In a response, a press officer for H & K Entreprenad writes, among other things, that the couple Selin had time to make a decision and that they did not act threateningly. It also disputes that "any name changes would have been made in order to hide past customer reviews or complaints," explains that it is "important to distinguish between factual inaccuracies and situations where disagreements have arisen" and turns "definitely against a general description of our business as conning elderly people into unnecessary renovations."
When DN looks among the disputes that H & K Entreprenad had with customers, we see that they did not win all cases. A 79-year-old man won last year in the district court in a so-called default judgment and the company (then under a different name) was ordered to pay SEK 389,000 plus court costs to the man.
