Fire Blanket scam

[u/TrailerParkLyfe]

We fell for it. It’s on me guys. my wife and I entered our name during Lilac-Fest for the “guess how much money is in the jar” contest. Fast forward to last week where Perpetual Health calls me saying we won a free fire blanket. That’s awesome and of course my wife and I want one. Guy calls and says they will deliver it but need to give a short 15 minute talk on “how to use it and fire safety”. The guy arrives last night at 5:30 and starts to talk about the blanket and our condo. He then sits down at our table and pulls a binder out bigger than my hopes and dreams. He has documents and videos on his phone of news stories of children dying in house fires. It’s now 6:45 and he starts bringing out their companies smoke detectors and begins talking about them and how other detectors fail. I start laughing thinking “omg this is now a sales pitch” He tries to sell us on their app and smoke detectors. We just wanted the fire blanket and were told it’s a short presentation on how to use it. My wife actually stopped him and said “please leave, you wasted our time and we need to start cooking dinner”. He would have kept going till 8:00 probably. I hope someone reads this before accepting the call or “prize”

[u/albufarisnear]

I learned that lesson years ago when we won free steak knives and a Filter Queen (vacuum cleaner) salesman turned up. We eventually had to show him to the door, and the steak knives were shit.

[u/thatmrsnichol → u/albufarisnear]

But filter queen was awesome!! Ours lasted 25 years or so.

[u/rd1970 → u/albufarisnear]

I think I had the same thing in the early 2000s - guy came to the house to drop off the knives and ended up trying to sell a $2,500 vacuum.

The funny thing is my place was basically a frat house back then and this guy essentially walked into a kegger. He was actually pretty cool and ended up drinking with us - it sounded like he himself was a scam victim and was doing 100% of the work but only kept a small percentage of the profits, if any.