Lawn Care Co. Offers Refund, Fires Worker After Surveillance Video Shows No Work Being Done

— -- When a Florida homeowner checked his home surveillance video to make sure a trouble area in his lawn was sprayed properly, he found out that the company he hired wasn't doing much to service his lawn.

When Rich Kleber arrived at his home in Weeki Wachee, Florida, on July 10, he found a sign planted in his lawn by TruGreen stating that they had been there to service the lawn. But his home surveillance video showed the TruGreen employee “get out of the truck, knock on the front door, walk around the property, get back in his vehicle for 5 to 7 minutes and then stick a sign on my door,” Kleber told ABC News today.

The company told ABC News that the worker has been terminated.

Kleber said he wanted to improve his lawn, so he hired TruGreen Lawn Care to service his property eight times a year. Every four to six weeks, TruGreen was supposed to service and spray Kleber's lawn with pesticides.

“I reviewed one other service in May, and the guy did a horrible job,” Kleber said of his dissatisfaction with the company. “After checking it this time, I feel that they didn’t provide any service, so I wanted a full rebate."

Kleber said TruGreen was less than receptive to his complaint, dismissing his criticism and giving him the run-around for weeks. Kleber said TruGreen even lied to him about the incident that he captured on video, telling him the man who serviced his house was a “seasonal employee,” when in fact he had worked there for 16 years.

TruGreen officials told ABC News that the July 10 visit was an unpaid service call, but Kleber disagreed and said a receipt for the service was left on his door.

Kleber said he reached his breaking point with the way the company was treating him, so he decided to post his surveillance video to Facebook.

"I exhausted all other options, I gave them a month -- I wanted a rebate because my lawn has only declined since I started their service," he said.

Within a day or two after posting the video to social media, which garnered nearly 20,000 views, members of TruGreen’s corporate office contacted Kleber to reach an agreement, Kleber said. He said he was offered a $1,000 refund by TruGreen in exchange for no further posts to social media about their company.

"They claim the check is in the mail, but I’ll believe it when I see it," Kleber said.

TruGreen issued the following statement in response to the incident: "We have nearly two million satisfied customers and more than 11,000 employees. Our specialists are paid by the hour, not the job, and are bonused on customer satisfaction and retention, not on the number of lawns they complete per day."

"We have a zero tolerance policy for fraudulent behavior, and terminate any employee who does not uphold our values of integrity and service," the company added. "In this specific case, the specialist was terminated and, although we were performing a free service call, we refunded the customer more than $800. We pride ourselves in our five core values of integrity, teamwork, service, community and safety. We provide extensive training to our specialists and have a number of measures in place to monitor performance. We expect our employees to do the right thing, and we regret that this individual’s actions cast a shadow on the thousands of TruGreen employees who do their work with integrity every day."