fatlama.com 

Much cheaper than my usual rental options with hire companies!

I had one cancellation which was annoying but the customer service team managed to find and rebook me an alternative on the same day!

Total scam artists.

Pose as fake customers on gumtree and suggest you use Fat Lama to rent instead of sell. As soon as you sign up they're no longer interested and there's already countless items like yours on the site, in your area, for the same price.

% cut for their service is pretty high considering how little you make from lending.

If anyone does show any interest in renting your items, expect endless calls and emails from Fat Lama who desperately encourage you to lend so they can make their cut.

Very lame, very annoying. Would not recommend unless you have the time to be bombarded with calls.

They will ask a lot about your personal details and abnormal amount of verifications.

They took a lot of details for signing me up. Now they took £800 from my account Without notifying me. There is no customer service phone number and I have received any email from their side after my dozens of emails.

Unethical methods of signing people up.

I advertised something on gumtree and received a text from someone asking if they could rent it for a week, using a service called fat lama. They offered about half of what I was selling it for so seemed worth it.

I set up an account especially. As soon as I put the item on the site, the person suddenly wasn't interested any more. I also noticed there were loads of very similar items already on the site so I found it very suspicious.

I wondered if it was a guerrilla marketing technique. You have to actually send them an email to delete your account, there is no button, so I wrote to them to unsubscribe and also asked them if they had anything to do with the text. Unsurprisingly, they completely ignored my question. They deleted my account but I still continued to get marketing emails from them!

Came on here out of interest and saw that others have had similar experiences. Company is absolute scum.

Listed an item on Gumtree and got the fake text that the person wanted to rent (odd request) etc etc.

I said sure, if you are local, just pop round and we can do it that way, saves the hassle, boom, no response.

Absolute scumbags!!

Company is completely useless! It’s a young company (in every aspect of the word) and, as a result, have absolutely no concept of Customer Service. It’s one of those Companies that when things are going well, all is good. But, as soon as the wheels fall off, no one has a clue what to do. I’ve had two issues with them recently. Firstly, they won’t let you set your own daily rate. By that I mean that if you choose ‘Smart Pricing’ and let’s say you want £10 a day, you enter £10 per day. Simple enough. Now, if you want to incentivise the borrower, you can have the option to select £10 a day, but £50 a week. Once again, pretty straightforward. However, if the borrower then rents an item for three days, it gives them a discount. But, you may only want to give them a discount if they rent for seven days or more. So, you only have two choices. Remove all the Smart Pricing and then the borrower gets no incentive to borrow for longer. Or, select the weekly/monthly Smart Pricing option and end up giving the lender a discount even if they only borrow an item for two days. After emails back & forth regarding this, they just ended up removing ALL my items Smart Pricing. So much for giving the customer what they want! It would literally have been ONE line of code their Developers would have had to modify (up to 7 days rental, charge x per day, more than 7 days rental, charge y). Second issue. I rented out a Drone and it was crashed (the borrower even left the video of the crash on the SD Card!). It has now been six weeks and the buyer has not paid for the repair. Fat Lama have not done anything (apart from the odd email every now and then saying that they will contact the borrower and see what is going on). They say that everything is insured. So, you’d think that their priority would be to get the item repaired ASAP and recoup the payment from the borrower afterwards. Read their Insurance FAQs yourself and look how simple they make the process sound. I can assure you, it’s not!

Fat Lama took £500 from my account without notice and without explanation. They are now ignoring my letters, emails and phone calls. They took this to cover cost of item before finding out if I had damaged it (I hadn't. Natural technology obsolescence) Yet they state they cover the cost of damage via insurance. This looks to me presently like a scam.

Like others have said, first came across this service when advertising some items for 'sale' on other websites. Instead of a text from a genuinely interested party, i got texts from this lot (they start with fake item interest followed by a random marketing pitch thrown in "why don't you rent this on Fat lama" bla bla bla. Seriously?
I checked them out here more closely and have to say so many of the 5* reviews I've read appear totally fake.
They had a similar theme of 'amazing' reviews going on in Google reviews (even several from the owners themselves congratulating their own platform on being awesome); they also managed to get a huge number of followers on social media in no time at all (bought?).
All in all, I have to question their integrity / credibility, as I don't see that they have any.

I've never signed up for this service, but I keep on getting messages from them asking me to sign up, everytime I post an item for sale on Gumtree. Absolute terrible marketing idea... If a company runs this kind of marketing campaign, then I definitely would not trust it with my equipment to rent.

This Company stole 68 pounds off me without invoicing me for it.

When I questioned why the money was taken from my account. They said the credit I had used to pay for the account was not valid. That is fair enough. However they didn't contact me and tell me I would have to pay the full price, giving me a choice. They just took the money out of my account.

Furthermore the 68 pounds was not invoiced to me. So I had no receipt of it which is illegal. They just took it straight out of my account without telling me. Therefor breaching the Consumer Credit Act.

Constant spam, even phone calls, texts, and emails from people trying to rent video equipment from me or to. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THAT. GO AWAY and stop spamming

Same kind of story every one else has said!
I listed some stuff on Gumtree last night, and got "the text" today (seems they're using a new number now- 07481 340 165) .
Why not just text and say who they are and ask if you've heard of the site and would like to try it instead of being deceptive, pissing people off, and making people lose sales on items?
we probably would have had a look and thought why not give it a go, and sell our item later if it didn't work out, but now, because of this fake rental text, i'm not interested in dealing with a company who messes people about!

No question, this is the best idea ever. I wish I had come up with it myself if I'm honest. Just borrowed a hoover from a guy down my street - only cost me a fiver. dream

AMAZING! My brother told me about this site where you can rent out your things. Just got my first rental on my bike! Easy £$£$£$£$£

Had a last minute rental cancellation, spoke to a customer service lady on the phone and she sorted me out with a replacement rental there and then... so good!

I got caught by the fake Gumtree texts too. I suspected that this was the case but decided to give it a go anyway. Spent a couple of hours setting it all up, reading small print etc.

I've now listed 3 items and have been registered for near to a month, however there's not a hint of interest in my items. Annoyingly, I missed out on selling the one item as I was waiting on a text back regarding the initial rental that was requested by text.

What a waste of my time. In tempted to give up and close my account. Looking at other users' accounts, with lack of reviews, there's clearly too small a customer base at present. People simply don't know about Fat Lama or are too weary to try it.

SCAM SCAM SCAM SCAM SCAM!!!
stay away you have been warned!! I had a Dodgy old text claiming they want to higher my push bike!! Even knowing ive put a advert on gumtree stating im selling the bike not renting it.. never heard of this company so I googled them and guess what loads of negative reviews and it looks like all the positive one's are all fake no surprise there!!! Why would anyone lend there item to a complete stranger who they never meet!!! Will forward this company details on to fraud team get them closed down

I found all these positive reviews astonishing. Late last year I considered renting my gear through fatlama and came on here to check them out. They were rated 6/10 stars with heaps of negative reviews. I backed well away from them at that point. I came back to see if it had improved and BOY HAS IT!

It’s a shame it’s a load of nonsense. All the reviews are spaced out like 4 hours apart, largely positive, all single reviews, even the bad reviews highlight how “excellent” the service is.

From this I see two things:

1. The people behind the reviews are untrustworthy and they are the people you trust with your precious kit, presumably sorting stuff out when it goes bad.

2. It’s so obvious that these reviews are fake that they must think their users are either stupid. Or they are stupid themselves because they think they won’t be noticed or possibly just don’t care.

I don’t get it. Why lie? Why not just make your service good? Backing out forever. Suggest you do the same.

Shame that trustpilot allows such things.