TLDR; Do not get ADT. Do not let the salesman inside your home. Do not let him persuade you into signing a contract - even if you’re sure you want it. Take a few days to think it over. Make sure you understand the monthly cost of the contract. Make sure you understand that the contract is not cancelable for 3 years. Then decide if their unreliability, terrible customer service, and cancellation fees are really for you. I feel a moral imperative to denounce ADT, the security system service. I realize that I'm preaching to the choir here but we all have to do our part in spreading the word of warning to friends and family members about ADT. They are a shady company that uses psychological tactics to take advantage of new home buyers. Their service is incredibly expensive and their contract is non cancelable until the term has ended. Even if their devices stop functioning, even if you want to move before the contract has expired, even if you cannot pay, and even though they have a 6 month money back guarantee, your money will not be returned and your contract will not be terminated. I have been putting off writing this for two months because, to be honest, I really don’t want to. Yet, I feel a moral imperative to denounce ADT partially out of vengeance, and partially out of an obligation I feel to help other people not make the same mistakes I have. This company has given me more animosity and hatred towards corporate america than anyone should have to experience, so if that's enough to convince you not to get ADT, no further reading is required. But if you want to hear a story detailing just how bad an ADT customer experience can be, then buckle in. My story begins in April 2021. I had been living in a new house for about a month and had received endless junk mail targeted and new home buyers. Much of it was from ADT - trying to get me to purchase their home security system service. At the time, I thought the idea of a camera doorbell was a good idea especially since I live alone (this doorbell camera is currently sitting in a closet because it stopped working). So I was not adverse to the idea of a security system, but I was not going to seek it out any time soon. Then one day two men came to my door. One, I would come to find, was an extremely practiced salesman. They started with small talk. I could tell they were experienced at this front porch interaction when I asked, “So what are you selling?” because he immediately responded, “What are we selling? More like what are we giving!” and then continued to describe the incredible reduction in upfront cost for the security devices. I was not yet convinced, and that was when I made my first mistake - and probably my biggest. I invited them inside. Truthfully, I wanted to know what they had to offer. I liked the idea of having a smart home and so I walked them around and they talked about what devices were on offer. Doorbell camera. Smart smoke detectors. Smart garage door. Smart door lock. Door and window sensors. We sat down at my kitchen table. The salesman had all of the tactics. Connect with the client. Joke about something from the past to loosen the mood. Act quickly and do not acknowledge their hesitation towards buying. Elicit a sense of urgency by mentioning how this deal will not last much longer. I had already shown too much interest for him to back down now. He talked me though their points based system and circled all the devices they had mentioned. I had not decide yet whether I wanted their service when he made a phone call. He put me on speaker with a sales representative who asked for my credit card information. At this moment I made my second mistake. I followed through despite my hesitation. They had set up a situation where I needed to be rude to get out of the transaction, and undecided as I was, I allowed the process to continue. A few days later someone came to install my devices. He was nice and did a great job. I should preface here that my detestation for ADT is not targeted at its technicians. ADT has a terrible customer experience, shady salesmen, and awful business practices, but their installation technicians and their call center employees are not to blame. He was even able to make a last minute change to the devices I had barely agreed to pay for. He set me up with 2 smart smoke detectors, a doorbell camera, a smart door lock, and a front door intrusion sensor. Mandatory with this installation was this stupid tablet that has to be installed into the wall. I’m sure this is necessary just to bloat the cost of the service. There wasn’t really a great place for it but we found space in my kitchen. It had all the same functionality as the mobile app (there are many different apps and they all suck). I never use this tablet and its bright screen is an eyesore. He left and I set up my device preferences. At first I was content with the way things were going. I thought that yeah, this will be worth it. I live alone so a security system is a good idea. What was not made clear to me was the price, term, and cancelation policy. About a week later, I was starting to feel buyers remorse. I was paying (I am still paying) $70.95 a month for their service. This number is nowhere on my contract. The number on my contract is $65.99 a month so I must assume tax is included later. This is the highest price I have seen anyone paying online. The contract states the total payment for the 3 year term is $2,375.64, except $70.95 x 36 = $2554.20, so thats what I’m really paying. This is a big scary number even for a home buyer so I began to have second thoughts. Now it starts to get ugly. About a month later my smart front door lock stopped working. Before it broke it was awesome. It would lock on a schedule at night so I wouldn’t have to worry about it. I could remote unlock from anywhere. On the negative side it was incredibly loud when it locked or unlocked, making this startling screechy noise. Now that it was unresponsive, and nothing I did seemed to fix it, I made my first call to ADT customer service. The gates to hell had opened. Let me just try to describe the delightful process required to fix a malfunctioning ADT product. First you call (800) 773-1391, talk to a robot, press some buttons to get redirected to customer service and wait 10 minutes for someone to answer. Once they answer they ask for some customer details. You give them the details and tell them your whole story. They say thanks and then transfer you to someone who can help. You wait another 10-15 minutes before talking to another human, all the while listening to incredibly loud clipping hold music frequently interrupted by an ad for how great ADT is. Google’s ‘hold for me’ feature is a godsend and without it I would probably not have made it this far. Finally a real person answers the phone and asks you for THE SAME details as before. You tell them your whole story again. (I think this format is by design to make users give up out of frustration, rather than just bad call center design). Now they walk you though the troubleshooting, all of which I had already done. It was obvious to me that it wasn’t going to work because the device wasn’t getting power, but It was required that I try connecting to it again. I should note that the call center ladies who talked to me were all very nice. They were doing their job to the best of their ability and the structure of the customer service is what was horrendous, not the employees themselves. At this point, about 45 minutes had gone by and I was finally being transferred to Save Haven. I didn’t know what Save Haven had to do with anything, I had never even heard the name before. The call redirected to an answering machine. I was prompted to leave a message. I didn’t know what to say - thought I would be talking to another call center person. So I left a message describing my story for a third time and hung up. Save Haven did not return my call. A week later I found that a lot of battery acid had spilled into the bottom of the battery slot in my door lock. I cleaned it out and the lock began to work again. It seemed to me that if the lock gets jammed, or tries to lock while the door is slightly open, it will literally just spill battery acid from the 4 AA batteries. To me, this seems like bad design. This was around the time I realized how much I actually hated that salesman. I felt manipulated and had only myself to blame. He was so skilled and effective at getting me to behave the way he wanted. A few years ago I had attended a 3 day training for Vector Marketing about how to sell Cutco knives. They were great knives, but I came away from the experience with a sense of distrust towards salesman. I learned how to act and what to say to maximize the chances of a sale. They were incredibly effective tactics, start with the most expensive product and work your way down, people usually agree to buy at around the 7th offer. It all felt nefarious. The point wasn’t to make a better world or a happy customer. It was to make money and ADT is no different. Now my buyer’s remorse was in full swing. Even though my devices were working, I really wanted to stop paying $70 a month. So I began to investigate how to cancel. ADT’s [6-Month Money-Back Guarantee](https://www.homesalarm.com/adt-guarantees/) seemed promising. > And finally, because ADT is so confident in providing you the best system, ADT has a Money-Back Service Guarantee! If during the first six months there is a service problem and ADT can’t satisfy you, ADT will take the system out and return all of your money- the installation or the up-front costs that you have paid, as well as the monthly investment. Certain restrictions apply. These restrictions, as I would find, would certainly apply. I first tried to cancel my ADT service July 26th. This cannot be done online, and so I prepared myself for more call center damnation. I waited 10 minutes to talk to someone who redirected me to someone else who I also waited 10 minutes to talk to. I knew breaking this contract wasn’t going to be easy so I was prepared to lie. I told the call center woman that I had lost my job and I couldn’t pay the monthly cost anymore. I told her it was no longer worth it to me and I was really getting screwed by the monthly cost. She was remorseful and polite and redirected me to someone who could help. After another 10 minutes of waiting, I was redirected to Safe Haven. This time someone answered the phone. I told my story a third time, as I expected I would have to, and she said she would write up an early termination quote. “I have to pay to cancel?” I said. “I lost my job, I don’t have any money, how am I supposed to pay?” She was less remorseful and avoided the question. I mentioned that I wished to use ADT’s 6 month money back guarantee. She said this guarantee was only valid after multiple attempts to fix a malfunctioning device. I was fed up and angry after wasting an hour on the phone. Later I got an email. It was a great deal, only $1755.74 to cancel my service. After all this, ADT was becoming the regret of the year. I really hated myself for letting that guy convince me to buy something I wasn’t sure about. Finally I let it go. I had given up. I wish the story ended here. On October 14 my smart doorbell stopped working. It dinged out of the blue that day and started making this irritating feedback humming sound. The device itself was unresponsive - as if it had stopped receiving power. At first I was annoyed, of course, but then I saw this as an opportunity. I thought that if ADT can’t fix this, I can use the 6 month money back guarantee displayed so prominently on their website. At this point, after going through so much loathing, I began to feel nefarious. This was my last chance. I was going to make it impossible to fix. If you don’t care about the details of my evil plan, skip this paragraph, but for my family members to whom I’ve told this story, this is the most interesting part. Firstly I removed the smart doorbell so the constant hum would stop. I really could not get the doorbell to function correctly, even after doing the troubleshooting. The hardware really was broken somehow but this wasn’t good enough for the money back guarantee. The technician that would come would just replace it with one that worked. I needed to make it unfixable. I reconnected it to the cables and inspected my door chime box, near the ceiling in the hallway. I didn’t know if the technician would try to open this, but if he did, I needed him to think it was wired correctly. I did a lot of brainstorming about how to make it look correct but not work. I tried wiring it incorrectly but it just kept working. Finally I came up with the perfect idea. There were two wires that wrapped around each other. They should have been in a wire cap and luckily I had one. I unwrapped the wires which broke the circuit. Then I wrapped one of the wires in wire tape, wrapped it around the other wire again, and put them in the wire cap. Now, without taking the wire cap off, the circuit appeared correct but secretly there was no connection with the wires inside the cap. I even prepared for what I might say if he was to remove the cap. I imagined myself saying, “Wow thats so strange why would that happen? Maybe if someone really wanted to cancel their ADT service and really needed this to be unfixable they would do something so drastic as to secretly break the circuit themselves…but if they got cough they would really need the technician to work with them and pretend the problem couldn't be solved…and that would really help them out…”. The paint had peeled up a bit around the box when I opened it so I even painted the wall around the box to make it look unopened again. In hindsight I was way overpreparing for this, maybe because it felt less than legal, or maybe because it was a bit exciting to be deceitful. With my devious plan in action, I called ADT to explain my predicament. Robot, 10 minutes, explain, 10 minutes, explain, mandatory troubleshooting, 10 minutes, Safe Haven. I explained for the third time to the Save Haven call center woman that my doorbell (which really was broken) had stopped receiving power. I made it clear all the while that I really wanted to cancel my service. She said she could send someone out to look at it, but it was going to cost $25. In my mind I was screaming. I had to pay… because their product… stopped working. This was the hight of my animosity towards ADT. With no other option, I agreed to the charge. That weekend, a technician arrived to inspect my doorbell. It took him all of 30 seconds to tell me that no power was getting to the device. He told me I needed to hire an electrician to fix it and left. “Fine”, I thought. Finally this should be enough for the 6 month money back guarantee. With not much time left in my 6 month window I called again. Robot. 10 minutes.Call center lady. 10 minutes. Now I was talking to someone who really seemed like they were going to help me cancel. He told me he had begone the cancelation process. He told me I needed to contact Safe Haven, but since it was in the evening they were closed. I would need to call back on monday. He gave me their number and I left Save Haven a message telling them that the cancelation process had become and I was going to cancel my service on monday. Monday arrived and I called Safe Haven - directly this time. A woman answered and I told her my entire story again. I had an issue that could not be fixed and I was going to invoke the ADT Money-Back Guarantee. She said that Safe Haven did not have the same guarantee as ADT but she could write me up a quote for an early contract termination instead. That was it. There was nothing else I could do. I made an assumption that Safe Haven, the ‘premier provider of smart home and security services’, the company that had purchased my ADT contract, would have the same guarantees as ADT, the company that I had signed the contract with in the first place. No. I was defeated. There was nothing else I could do. Today (Dec 15 2021), I decided there was something I could do. Its been two months since my final attempt to cancel their service, and I have decided to act on my moral imperative to denounce ADT. I just could not let this injustice go unheard. So, I hope that if you have read this far you understand the risks of working with a company like this. The only way I can fight back against this injustice is to denounce their cooperation and discourage people from working with them in the future. Thank you for reading this and have a nice day.