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The American Home Shield & Frontdoor Inc. Scam

Frontdoor Scam
6 min readOct 12, 2021

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Hello. This page is a list of resources for people who have been scammed by American Home Shield, HSA Home Warranty, LandMark Home Warranty, and OneGuard — all subsidiaries of Frontdoor Inc.

If you’re here to get ahold of someone at AHS/Frontdoor Inc., I’ve posted their publicly-available emails below.

If you are being stonewalled — and you probably are — consider the list of authorities and consumer protection organizations here. File a complaint to the FTC here.

Please sign the petition to have the Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slattery investigate American Home Shield, Frontdoor Inc., and CEO Rex Tibbens here.

In late 2019 I bought an old house using my VA loan, after ten years of service in the United States Army. I am thankful to the American people for this benefit — and I was excited to own my first home.

At the suggestion of my realtor I bought a home repair warranty, about $1,000 for a year of coverage. She recommended American Home Shield’s home warranty program, which said it covered parts and labor for any number of items in my home.

As it turns out, American Home Shield (owned by Frontdoor Inc.) is a simple bait-and-switch. Its true business is to take your money, then make it impossible to file a claim.

The way they do this is complex, but it’s obvious their strategy is to hope their customers just give up. While you may have been unlucky enough to get scammed by the Frontdoor Inc. syndicate, I’ve broken the techniques that they use into the following categories:

1. Hidden terms

One key to AHS’s gaslighting strategy is the ‘modifications’ clause in every contract. A modifications clause is a very reasonable thing, to be fair. AHS cannot reasonably be responsible for, say, moving a structural wall to install an electrical outlet. The sneakiness comes in how they employ the ‘modifications’ clause at their convenience. Many unhappy customers report this as being the key reason their claims are denied.

Here is an example of the ‘modifications’ clause in my contract:

Out of the five claims I’ve made with AHS, all except one have been denied under the “modifications” clause. Let me give you an example.

We had a series of electrical outlets go out in one section of our house. When I called AHS, they sent a barely-professional electrician out. This call cost me $100 by the way — all service calls do, payable to AHS. He was too incompetent to diagnose the problem. I called AHS back and they sent another, more professional electrician. Another $100, another incompetent electrician.

Only after emailing a dozen people and roughly four hours of navigating AHS/Frontdoor’s dark-patterned customer service maze, did AHS indicate they could do a ‘pay out’ to an electrician of my choice. A ‘pay out’ is when AHS’s own subcontractors are unable to fix the problem. You call someone competent, then AHS supposedly pays them instead of their useless subcontractors.

In this case, my competent (and third) electrician said the easiest thing to do, instead of ripping out the walls, was to just run a new line. Finally, progress!

He gave me a quote for the work, and sent it to AHS. AHS quickly denied the claim on the premise that the electrician had to diagnose the actual problem. AHS is very speedy when it comes to denying claims.

To do this — to trace the problem from the outlet on the second floor down to the box — would cost tens of thousands of dollars in repairs! When I finally got back in touch with an AHS customer service rep, she said that would be the only way AHS would pay for it: if I ripped my house apart. Convenient.

When I explained that this would be astronomically more expensive than just running the new line, she said the claim would be denied under the ‘modifications’ clause — and promptly offered a paltry $250 as consolation–which wouldn’t even cover the $300 I’d already spent trying to get a competent electrician out there in the first place!

But note how sneaky AHS is! By inserting a term in which the problem must be diagnosed vis-a-vis ripping the house apart, AHS can deny the claim based on those very modifications. A cleverly-worded contract with hidden, undefined terms allows AHS to deny most claims.

What’s most interesting to me is that the one claim AHS did actually pay for — a leaky pipe– required plenty of ‘modifications’ to the pipe itself to install it.

What exactly does ‘modifications’ mean in my contract? I asked, bluntly. The CSR refused to answer over the course of several emails.

2. Misleading Marketing

American Home Shield says they cover labor, which was an important part of signing up for the home warranty, as those costs can often far exceed the cost of whatever parts or appliances you might need replaced.

Here is their FAQ page [Archive.org], stating they cover parts & labor:

Of course that could not be further from the truth, when they redefine any work done as “modifications” (see above). Here’s another example of AHS being misleading about covering labor.

It’s also worth noting that American Home Shield gets awful ratings on sites where reviews cannot be bought, including the Better Business Bureau where it averages a 2.45 out of 5, and has had over 22,000 complaints in the past three years — that’s an average of twenty BBB complaints per day.

3. Stonewalling & Gaslighting

American Home Shield puts a dozen barriers between you and a resolution to your claim; the first and foremost is their customer service.

Here’s how a typical call goes:

  1. Call the 1–800 number and enter in your policy information. Listen to the list of claims you’ve got entered
  2. Navigate the number tree until you talk to a CSR (Frontdoor outsources the bulk of its call centers to the Philipines.
  3. Explain to the CSR your problem. They’re always very nice and polite, but are powerless. They have to read through your entire customer service notes — if the last CSR even bothered to put them in.
  4. They will call the contractor or whomever and what will ensue is a comedy of miscommunication.
  5. You will be in this loop for weeks because no CSR will follow up. Most AHS/Frontdoor customers complain about having to wait for weeks to get a resolution
  6. One pro tip is to demand that you talk to the cancellations department. Unsurprisingly, this gets you to someone who ostensibly has the power to fix things — but they’ll ghost you too.

That’s the telephone/call route. What I had to do to get someone who was at least halfway competent was to email the entire executive team, using the publicly-available email addresses below.

Keep in mind, once you get past a few exhaustive rounds with the Executive CSRs, they’ll just refer you to their legal department.

Bottom Line

You’d be better off socking away $100/month to cover your repairs, because AHS/Frontdoor won’t cover jack.

I’ll be updating this page with additional contact information and updates. If you’d like to send me good quality intel or information, you can contact me at frontdoorscam@protonmail.com or on twitter @frontdoorscam

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Frontdoor Scam

Written by Frontdoor Scam

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