What we do not publish, and why

This site publishes nothing about defeating locks. No picking, no bumping, no shimming, no bypass, no impressioning, no decoding, no destructive-entry technique, no tool recommendations for any of the above, and no links to resources that teach them.

This is not a coverage gap we intend to fill later. It is a permanent boundary.

Why publish the boundary instead of just having one

Two reasons. It is a trust signal: a site that tells you plainly what it will not do is easier to judge than one that leaves you guessing. And it is self-enforcement — having written it down publicly makes it much harder to quietly erode later when some keyword looks tempting.

How it is enforced

Automatically, in three places. Questions are classified against a pattern list before any page is generated, and anything asking for a technique is dropped and logged rather than answered. Rendered output is scanned for a banned-term list, and a match fails the build. And the classification counts require a human sign-off before the pipeline will continue.

The pattern list, the routing policy and the sign-off process live in SCOPE-BOUNDARY.md in the repository.

What happens to a question we will not answer

It depends on what is being asked. A question about getting into something you plausibly own — your car, your house, your safe, your mailbox — is a real problem with a legitimate answer, so it routes to a page about the legitimate route: the property manager, the dealer, roadside assistance, the safe manufacturer's recovery process, or a locksmith you have verified.

A question that is purely a request for technique gets no page at all.

There is one deliberate carve-out. A question about whether a professional can do something is not a request for instructions, and we answer it — because "non-destructive entry is normally possible" is the single most useful thing a person can know when a technician tells them the lock has to be drilled.

How should you use this section?

Start with whichever page matches the situation you are actually in, then read the checklist once while nothing is wrong.

Almost everything on this site is easier to act on before you need it. The six questions in the Verify checklist take about a minute and are considerably easier to ask from your sofa than from your doorstep at midnight, which is the moment they are designed for.

Every page here names its sources and shows when each was retrieved. Where we could not confirm something — a board URL, a price range, a figure attributed to an agency — the page says so rather than guessing, and that gap is itself information about how much of the published material in this trade is worth trusting.

What will you not find here?

Anything about defeating a lock, and any reason for us to send you somewhere.

We do not publish entry techniques of any kind. That is a permanent editorial boundary rather than a gap, and it is enforced against every page before it can ship. The reasoning is set out on the scope boundary page.

We are also not a locksmith, we do not dispatch anyone, and we do not sell leads. There is no phone number anywhere on this site, and the build fails if one appears. On a site whose advice is "do not call the first number you see", that seemed like the minimum.

How do we decide what to publish?

Sources are ranked, and the ranking decides what a page is allowed to claim.

Tier one is primary: the FTC, state attorneys general, state licensing boards, ADA.gov and the Access Board, NFPA, the eCFR. Tier two is the trade and standards bodies — ALOA, SAVTA, DHI, BHMA, UL, and manufacturer technical documentation. Tier three is cost aggregators and company blogs, and it is only ever used for estimates, always attributed.

Locksmith company content is the dominant source of published material in this trade, and a meaningful share of it comes from the operations this site exists to warn people about. All of it is treated as tier three, and none of it is ever the source for a pricing claim, a licensing claim, or a claim about when a lock needs to be destroyed.

Pages that touch law or regulation carry a further requirement: a primary government or standards source, and a dated notice saying which one and when. A page that cannot meet that does not ship.

How current is any of this?

Every page carries the date it was last reviewed, and that date is not decorative.

It comes from a record of when the page's content actually changed, not from the date of the most recent build. A page that has not been edited keeps its original date rather than quietly resetting to today, because a site that claims everything was reviewed this morning is telling you nothing.

The same applies to the sitemap we give search engines. Regulatory pages are the ones that move: a state repeals a licensing act, a board changes its address, an agency publishes an alert. Where we retrieved something on a specific date, the page says so, and where a link could not be confirmed we name the agency instead of publishing an address we have not tested.

What does a fair locksmith visit actually look like?

Worth describing, because most coverage of this trade only describes the bad version and leaves you with no baseline.

You call. Someone answers with a business name rather than a generic greeting. They ask what the lock is, where you are, and whether you can prove you belong there — a legitimate technician will ask for identification matching the address before opening anything, and being asked is a good sign rather than an inconvenience.

They quote a total, itemised, and will put it in a text message. They give an arrival window and a vehicle. The technician arrives in that vehicle, shows identification without being prompted, and confirms the price before touching the door. If the job turns out to be different from what was described, they stop and tell you what the new price would be before continuing rather than after.

The work is non-destructive where that is possible, and where it is not they explain why, get your agreement, and price the replacement before starting. You get an itemised receipt with a business name on it, and you can pay by card.

None of that is exotic. It is simply what a functioning trade looks like, and most locksmiths operate this way — which is the thing the scam coverage tends to obscure.