Someone's cutting into Cothron's Safe and Lock, scamming the 60-year-old company's customers.
"We have had customers call us and want to know when we're coming back on jobs we've never been on," Cothron's Operations Manager Jim Hancock said. "When we've gone out, we've found out that these other folks are basically the ones that have been out there."
Many of them don't have licenses, and they target customers on the Internet. If a person types in "locksmiths in Austin" in a Google search engine, they will get a list that has Cothron's at the top. The phone number attached to it, though, isn't even Cothron's--it's the scam artist's.
"I think that we were the biggest target, obviously, because we're the biggest shop in town, and the thought process being that we'd never miss the business," Hancock said.
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Locksmith scam
One local locksmith is a prime example of how a scam can happen to just about anyone.
 
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Scammers came close to getting the best of Austin/Travis County EMS. A commander looked up Cothron's information on the Internet and called the bogus number. A man who posed as a Cothron's employee showed up at the EMS job site. Fortunately, the commander smelled a rat before he could get taken.
He found the real number to Cothron's and called for employee Eric Jackson to come out while the imposter was still there.
The jig was up.
"He [the imposter] turned around to go, and they just followed him to his car and got all the information," Jackson said, referring to the commander, who got the license plate number off the imposter's car before he left.
Other locksmith companies are getting scammed.
Google showed that all of them had 1-(800) numbers attached and most had false addresses throughout Austin.
Your best bet not to get scammed is to click all the way through a listing until you get to the locksmith's actual Web site. The real number should be there.
