BarkReviews 1,644

First became aware of this company when they started spamming our website contact EMail address, with daily (or sometimes multiple spam per day) claiming to be sending us leads for people interested in the services we provide. The only real difference between Bark & most garden-variety spammers is that Bark doesn't lead with their sales pitch - but it's obvious that it is a sales pitch if you try to actually respond to any of the leads they send you, because that's the point where they ask for payment.

The traditional definition of spam is "unsolicited commercial email" - and the the EMails from Bark clearly meet that definition. They are both unsolicited (we never subscribed to mail from them or requested the messages in any other way), and commercial in nature (by being advertisements/sales solicitations for their services).

It also appears that they are making no attempts to comply with federal anti-spam laws, at least here in Canada where we're based - and in our case, their spam was sent to a. Ca domain name, so it's not exactly rocket science to figure out where we're based. CASL, Canada's federal anti-spam laws, requires senders of "CEM" (commercial EMail marketing) - including Bark - to obtain explicit, opt-in consent from the address owner before sending marketing EMail to that address. In our case, since they started spamming an address that they'd scraped from a website, they didn't even make an attempt to give us the opportunity to provide (or decline) consent - let alone actually obtain it.

If you're in Canada and receiving spam from Bark, then the best solution is probably to report them to the CRTC - the federal agency responsible for enforcing the anti-spam laws.

MY ORIGINAL REVIEW: They put me in touch with three firms of bricklayers, two quite local, the other surprisingly far away. All gave estimates and I did in fact use one of them who was very satisfactory. I noticed that one of the companies didn't seem to know who or what Bark was, yet they had obviously been contacted by them. As far as I can tell it's a perfectly legitimate company and found me results almost at once.

EDIT: To my acute embarrassment I now have to rescind what I said about the Bark website. The man I employed, supposedly a bricklayer who was trading under the name "A1 Home Improvements" and using the email address "*******@icloud.com" turned out to be a fraudster. He took a deposit of £500 for which he gave me a junk receipt and disappeared off the face of the earth. If you know anything about him (from that email address his name might be Thomas Harber) the crime has been reported to Police Action Fraud, phone number *******040 and the Crime Number is NFRC*******626, Reported 29/01/2020 at 15.48. Do please phone in any information about him you may have and help to protect others from similar frauds. Obviously the Bark website conducts no checks on the people listed on their site, and based on that experience you would be a fool to have anything to do with them. They were completely unhelpful when asked to give any information held to either me or the police.

Within 12 hours I had many companies contact me. I went with Greenteam. It was a huge job. Very efficient. Great price.
******Have to edit this review, the trees had started to grow back within a couple of weeks. It wasn't long before it was like a forest again. Roots were all left and for someone that is on invalidity and has to save very hard to get work like this done, I am very disappointed. Trees and bushes that were cut down were not taken away in full. In fact there is still a pile behind my wall in a public green area. I haven't been able to access that part of my garden at all.