Home Improvement Fraud
/Disclaimer: We love our General Contractor. This is not a post about him, or any of the contractors he brought to the job. This capital-M Mistake was all me.
I hired a neighbor, someone I’ve known around town for about 2 years and who lived a few doors down, thinking that would shield us from some of the risks of home improvement hell. HAHAHAHAHAHHAHA!!! Turns out, the guy I hired sold us cabinets he wasn’t authorized to sell, never placed the order, and then blamed the company for delays when I started asking for the ETA. Since asking for a refund, he’s disappeared. To save others from the headache of reinventing the wheel, here’s what I learned:
Document everything in writing. This can be hard copy, email, text, whatever. Save the time stamps on phone conversations. Keep it accessible. Hopefully you’ll never need it, but if you do, you have proof of what occurred.
Always get customer order numbers, dates, and last names. I started to get a Spidey tingle when the vendor couldn’t (or wouldn’t) provide me with this information.
If you start feeling suspicious, don’t hesitate to check up on what you’re being told. Back-ordered item? Call the manufacturer directly. Price seems excessive? Get outside confirmation online, from other vendors, or from the manufacturer.
NEVER pay by check if you can avoid it. You want the credit card company to fight over the refund, not you - although filing a home improvement claim in NJ may entitle you to sue for 3x documented damages. Do a Google search for the company’s earnings and the individual contractor’s net worth before bothering, however. They can’t pay you what they don’t have.
Create as long a trail on the person as you can. Get a police report even if you don’t pursue them in civil court. Contact Consumer Affairs in your state (or county if possible - my county’s office in NJ is closed due to budget cuts) and make sure to link your complaint to the business name AND the individual contractor’s name. The guy who ripped us off has had 3 business names in 3 years, and emailed me to say his “heart wasn’t in it anymore” so he’d be closing this one as well. The problem is businesses are often considered separate from their owners. A complaint about an individual on the Better Business Bureau (BBB), for example, is hard to find. Last names are removed and the complaints are linked to the business name. If the person has closed a business and is operating under a new business name, good luck tracking down any complaint history. Consumer Affairs says they can link to both, so ALWAYS check your contractors in their database before you hire them, and if you have to file a complaint, ask them to link it to the person AND the business name.
If your contractor tells you outright that they have alias personas on social media or email because it ‘helps people feel more comfortable,’ red flag!! Lots of companies say ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ to make themselves sound more established and this isn’t usually a problem. This guy created alias social media profiles to look like neutral people who were making unbiased referrals to his business. In my opinion, it also helps him confuse his victims because when you’re printing out your documents, you have to remember to look for communication with all of these different ‘people.’ Certain conversation threads would start from one email and continue on another without the usual cc-ing or niceties that accompany involving additional people in a job, which made it incredibly inconvenient to pin down details.
Make sure your contractor has an up-to-date license number. Apparently this should be displayed everywhere their company name or letterhead appears, which is why you often see license numbers on contractor vans. This guy never shared his license number and I didn’t know to ask. Consumer Affairs says an expired or nonexistent license number is indictable.
When contacting Consumer Affairs, find out your investigator’s name and follow up with them. If you’re on the phone, they look at your file. My investigator was pulled from health care fraud to assist with the stacks of home improvement complaints. She didn’t know all the details, but at least she was on the phone and could provide basic guidance. She advised filing a Probable Cause Statement with the local courthouse because that HAS to be read over by a judge. The police may or may not pass your report on to the local prosecutor, but according to Consumer Affairs, anybody has the right to file a criminal complaint against anyone for any reason. I thought I had to go through the police, but I don’t. Having a police report helps, but she suggested going directly to the court clerk. I haven’t done this yet, but will update this post when I do.
Since the credit card has conditionally refunded our payment pending their investigation, technically we’ve been ‘made whole’ and don’t have grounds to sue. I’m still planning to find out about the Probable Cause Statement because I want to make it as difficult as possible for this jerk to prey on others. But the bottom line is that it’s easier for contractors who know the system to weasel out of consequences than it is for the consumer to make anything stick. Our Consumer Affairs investigator said these people never stop, they just move on. So protect yourself and do your due diligence. I hate to say it because I really believe in supporting people you know, but you need to check up on everyone - even your neighbors - before you hire them. You never know who you’re dealing with.
As a humorous side note, in a roundabout way I discovered that the guy likely turned over our money to the mob (welcome to NJ?!). I asked whether I should back off from pursuing him because I didn’t want to meet his connections firsthand. I was astutely reminded that the mob doesn’t prey on their neighbors. Junkies do that. So watch out. You never know.
