I have never used this blog to complain about service from a company before but I have recently been royally screwed by Samsung Electronics and their pathetic service affiliate Lakes Electronics of Fort Lauderdale, FL so I feel like I should warn anyone else out there may consider making the mistake of buying a product from either of them or using any service they provide.

Samsung DLP televisions are defective. They are so defective that to avoid a class action lawsuit the company is offering to send out service representatives to fix televisions that are no longer under warranty. Unfortunately the service company Samsung sends out, Lakes Electronics of Fort Lauderdale, is as defective as the televisions they make.

The whole ridiculous thing started a few weeks ago when I noticed that my Samsung television had a small white dot on the screen. A couple of weeks later there were two dots and eventually there were three. Concerned that a 3 year old Samsung television that cost a $1000 dollars was going out I searched the internet and found hundreds of complaints from other people suffering the same problem. Some of the other people with defective tv’s recommended that you call Samsung because there had been so many problems that they would come out and replace the defective chips which cause the problem.

So I took the advice and called Samsung. They offered to send out someone to replace the defective chip in my television. When the service technician arrived at my home I had a fully functioning television that had a defective chip and a few white dots but worked fine otherwise. By the time the service technician left my house the TV didn’t work at all.

I called Lakes Electronics to let them know that their service technician had broken my TV and they said it would be a week before they could come back out. Despite my frustration I waited patiently for them to come repair the damage they caused. Unfortunately a week later the same service tech, Adam Shapiro, came out and told me that he would not fix it  because it now needs a new lamp and the owner of Lakes Electronics, Andy Macpherson, would not accept responsibility for the damage they had done. Let me be clear my television worked fine until Adam Shapiro of Lakes Electronics took my television apart to fix it.

I tried to explain the situation to Samsung by phone but they refused to do anything about the television they broke and I called Lakes Electronics and their service manager, Mike Bavetz, tried to tell me that it was a complete coincidence that my TV didn’t work after Adam Ahapiro worked on it. So now my television doesn’t work at all and neither Samsung nor Lakes Electronics will repair the damage they have done.

So the moral of the story is:

1) Do not buy Samsung products

2) Do not allow a Lakes Electronics repairman in your house

UPDATE 1/19/2011

Samsung and Lakes electronics did finally fix my television today. At the time I wrote the original blogpost neither company was willing to accept responsibility for the damage done to my TV but after I reamed them out here and on Twitter Samsung had a customer service representative contact me and agreed to send the repairman back out.

The repairman, Adam, did come back out and although it took more than two months to get the needed parts and fix the TV it is finally done. I hammered them when they screwed up so I want readers to know that they did eventually get it right. But the fact is that I would have been without a television had I not raised cain about the way they treated me in the first place. It didn’t have to be that way.