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Moving company accused of fleecing military family who relocated to Colorado

Posted at 11:42 PM, Aug 20, 2018
and last updated 2018-08-21 01:50:38-04

Editor's note: Contact7 seeks out audience tips and feedback to help people in need, resolve problems and hold the powerful accountable. If you know of a community need our call center could address, or have a story idea for our investigative team to pursue, please email us at contact7@thedenverchannel.com or call (720) 462-7777. Find more Contact7 stories here.

AURORA, Colo. — A military family relocated to Colorado to start their new life. Now they’re missing more than $14,000 worth of their stuff. 

They say their moving company is to blame. Now nearly a year later, the problem still isn’t solved. They reached out to Contact7 for answers.

Melissa Scofield is at her wit's end.

“Being in the military, we’re not rich. We don’t have a lot,” Scofield told Denver 7’s Tom Mustin. “They’re screwing over a veteran. To me that’s more heartbreaking than the value of anything," she told Mustin.

Last August, her husband Sgt. Keith Scofield, an Iraq war veteran, was medically discharged from the Marines. The couple then moved from North Carolina to Aurora. 

They hired a moving company called Total Military Management out of Jacksonville, Florida. That’s when they say their nightmares began.  

When the movers arrived in Colorado, Melissa says numerous items were broken. Her garage is still filled with pieces shattered in the move. 

Even more disturbing, she says $14,000-worth of furniture and electronics were missing.

“A ton of stuff was missing,” said Scofield. "They admitted they had two or three shipping crates worth of our household goods. They said they had absolutely no idea where it could be.”

Countless calls and emails later, Melissa Scofield says the company sent a representative in Colorado to check out the problem. They documented pages of missing and broken items.

“They’ve said there’s a lot of stuff broken and missing, so they have that all documented,” she said.

The Scofields then received an email from the company offering to settle the claim for $1,915. Scofield says she and her husband had already spent more than $10,000 replacing the missing items, which are still nowhere to be found.

“All of our credit cards are maxed out from just trying to replace the stuff that’s missing,” she said.

Now, eight months later, Scofield says the company refuses to answer their calls.

Contact 7 contacted the Better Business Bureau in Florida and found pages and pages of similar complaints against Total Military Management.

We called and emailed the company but have not heard back from them.