Staying Fit
In this story:
How scams work • Red flags • Protect yourself • Ensure successful renovations • Reporting scams • Resources
If you are a homeowner, you may have experienced someone showing up at your door offering to do work for you. They might say they happened to be driving by and noticed a problem with your roof. “Once in your home, they say it’s an emergency and needs to be fixed immediately. They take their tools up to the attic or crawl space under your roof and bang their hammers around. You pay them for this work in cash, but they didn’t do anything,” says Andy Apter, president of the National Association of the Remodeling Industry who also owns his own construction business in Annapolis, Maryland.
Some home improvement scams are much more involved, however. The head of the National Association of Home Builders remodeling division, Alan Archuleta, who is also president of Archuleta Builders in Morristown, New Jersey, says at least three homeowners in his area have been victims of such scams in the past five years. They may be seeking bids for a big project, such as an addition or a major renovation, and a contractor will “come in at a number that is very appealing,” says Archuleta.
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Then the contractor will offer to take another 5 percent off the price if they’re paid in cash — a big red flag, notes Archuleta: “What [scammers] are basically doing is setting themselves up to take that large [deposit], and … vanish.” Sometimes they’ll stall, running into supposedly unforeseen problems and delays that will require even more of your money. (The Perfect Scam podcast details the experience of a Wisconsin homeowner whose contractor disappeared with a large deposit, after many delays and headaches.)
When you consider that Americans spent an estimated $567 million on improving their homes in 2022, according to the most recent report on remodeling from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, you can see why homeowners are targeted. Nearly 83,000 reports of home repair, improvement and product scams were reported to the Federal Trade Commission in 2023.
When you hire a contractor to repair or renovate your home, make sure your money doesn’t go into a scammer’s pocket.
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