Fortress Security — Local services in Grapevine

I would recommend avoiding this company. After being a good customer for ~4 years, I cancelled the service by the terms of our contract. I sent them a courtesy email on 4/7/21 and mailed them a letter on 4/8/21 as required by the contract. They either lost, trashed, misplaced, or whatever the letter I sent and claimed to never have received it.

Not only do they claim not to have received it, but they also accuse me of being untruthful and state I never mailed the letter. See screen shots of email thread. Hindsight being 20/20, I should have sent the cancellation letter via certified mail but doing so for cancelling an alarm service seemed a bit overkill. I can show when I drafted the letter and state that their assertion that I drafted the letter but never mailed it is absurd. See screen shots of file properties.

I will say, I was mistaken when I said the email had an original signature, I had to look up the legal meaning of that, so their claim that the email didn't meet the contract requirement is correct. However, since they knew I was cancelling via the courtesy email, one would think Fortress Security would contact me if they actually didn't receive the letter. I understand they want to retain business, by attempting to do so by omission & deception is a despicable practice. I was a good customer during my time with them. We always paid on time and kept their equipment in good working order, so for Fortress Security to say after ~4 years of being a good customer, now that I'm cancelling, I'm a no-good, dishonest customer doesn't sit well and leaves a horrible aftertaste.

When ending the relationship, Fortress Security showed their true business practices. Since their mail handling procedures lack something to be desired, they auto-renewed my contract and decided to bill me for the entire auto-renewed contract period thru June 2022 even though I cancelled well within the required timeframe. On top of that, they asked me what I deemed a loaded question in order to bill for equipment and materials they, more than likely, have full intention of abandoning. See screen shot of email thread. Needless to say, if you're changing vendors from Fortress Security to another company, make sure your new vendor pulls new wire or I'm sure you'll end up paying the price. Had I used coaxial cameras, I would have made the mistake of using wires in place and been on the hook for it.

Unrelated to the above, but enlightening to their business practices, is how they deal with contract negotiations. We were in negotiations for 10 sites and Fortress Security, since they were incumbent at two of our sites, was the only company I solicited a bid from. I had a project that took higher priority than the security bid and delayed in finalizing. When I got back to the security bid and was ready to give Fortress Security the go ahead, they increased the price of several items in the original quote. While they are certainly entitled to do so as the original quote had expired, I thought it was bad business for what was now going to be a volume account. I don't remember the exact amount the quote increased, but it was enough for me to solicit bids from multiple companies. As I'm working thru quotes and narrowed down to two vendors (Fortress Security and Alert 360), I was dealing with Michael DeLeon at Fortress Security. Mr. DeLeon had the audacity to state "I have a ton of equity in this quote and you need to send me the quote from Alert 360." I replied with a hard no and stated he needed to put his best foot forward with only one bite at the apple and it would be unfair to the other vendors to share their work product. On the other side with Alert 360 and dealing with Kipp Kelton, it was a pleasure as Mr. Kelton conducted himself with impeccable decorum and professionalism.

In the end and after jumping thru hoops with the information they requested, I told them to schedule a binding arbitration and we'll let an...

I was a Fortress Customer for almost ten years. I had two systems at two different addresses. They treated us very well and were always responsive, respectful and professional anytime me or my family needed to talk with them. Their wireless systems were very convenient for our homes. The pricing was tiered for monitoring and each sensor, so my pricing for my 1400 sq ft home and 1100 sq ft home was approximately $50 per month per house ($100). This also included access to the app to arm and disarm. My family and I eventually moved to a new city with an alarm system pre built in to our new home. Needing only monitoring, I tried to work with Fortress to negotiate a new price. This is when I found out the small print in the contract. My original contract expired at year three for both homes but built in was an auto yearly renewal that they were not willing to terminate unless I bought out the contracts (standard in the alarm industry apparently). They offered to transfer my account but would barely budge on pricing to remain competitive with other service providers. Fortress did cut the yearly balances in half on my two contracts and after doing the math for years ahead I bought them out to leave Fortress due to their inability to negotiate pricing for monitoring only. Their pricing for my needs were still more than 150% higher priced than other DFW competitors. I will remain grateful to Fortress, to Mark and Angela for the really awesome communication and customer service, to their techs for always answering questions when they arose and to Fortress in general for making my family feel safe with the alarm system and monitoring. I wish I could have stayed with them but their inability to budge on the contract pricing per month for monitoring only, the huge price gap in competitiveness, and the fact that they made me pay to leave rubbed me the wrong way. I felt like after almost a decade of being a customer some more grace and bendability to retain me as a customer should have been done. They should review their monthly prices and maybe think about how they handle established customers a little bit better. That is my only complaint. Other than that, if you're thinking of becoming a new customer, go for it. They're awesome and you won't be let down. At every turn they will be there for you and your family when you need them, and their service is very reliable. Thank you Fortress and your team. We greatly...

If I could give no stars I would. Fortress Security is the nasty awful gift that keeps on giving. We were allowed to cancel service after days on end calling. The reason for us wanting to cancel is because we found out that we had been provided false statements by the company techs about why our service did not work anymore. Cameras only no alarm, fire, ambulance, glass break etc. The techs came out multiple times to “reboot” the system to no avail. They told us because of where we lived there is no 3g service due to only 5g towers in our area now. So we liked the cameras and we figured that’s as good as it gets because we believed in our Fortress team’s words. What they are trying to charge us for now is $31.14 from the last time the techs came out years ago and tried to reboot the system to no avail. We have already paid multiple times for them to come out and do something about our service and we do not feel like we were obligated to pay since they keep coming out and doing nothing. They say they are going to turn us in to collections. What we tried to do was disconnect from this company in an adult manner, but this company acts like a bunch of thug children. When you call them they try to say nobody has a boss that you can talk to. Everyone is busy you can’t talk to anyone unless you call repeatedly. The only reason we reached out to another provider was because they raised our bill once AGAIN and we were tired of paying more and more with NO service. Low and behold, guess what we found out by the other Provider. The only reason our service was not working was because Fortress would not update the equipment. He said he had plenty of customers in our area with full service so we have been advised by our lawyer to try to get people to join in on a class action lawsuit against this company and we will be looking to sue them for the backpay for years of service that was not provided that we were paying for because they wanna hassle us over $31.14 when we tried to break up with this company and be done with them but they won’t be done with us. If I could save one person from getting involved with this company by this post, I hope it helps. Just so everyone knows, a security company is not supposed to raise the bill multiple multiple times. It is a fixed rate and beware of the lifetime contract clause they slip in to your contract! That is not normal business practices for a security company. Beware they are very...