I’m trying to see it from his perspective. He
a. May actually be swamped
b. Doesn’t have the $2300 to return
Like, what does he expect to happen? Does he think he can just string you along forever and you’ll forget about the debt? If you do sic the police on him, but he doesn’t physically have the money, what can he do then?
When I talked w/ my sheriff deputy buddy a few days ago about this, he asked me, “Did you specifically ask for the money to be returned to you?” I said, “No - just materials.” He replied, “Ask him for the materials or the money to be returned to you.” He seemed to think that asking for the money (not just the materials) is key.
At any rate, I guess I’ll see what happens. 
Most likely he’s gotten behind and is hoping someone else’s new down payment will pay for Crafter Man’s materials and then he’ll use the profits to pay for the materials he should have bought with the money he diverted to Crafter Man’s project. It’s kind of like a slow burning Ponzi scheme where each new job pays for the previous job’s materials.
This happened to a guy I knew; he was a really nice, one-man roofer. He was always way behind on all his jobs. He took someone’s deposit and didn’t get around to starting it before the guy lost his patience and demanded his money back. Which my friend didn’t have, because he was floating all these jobs haphazardly. He got arrested, his mugshot in the paper, and lost everything. He came by my house in the middle of it and wanted work but I didn’t dare give him any money for materials because I knew he was desperate and would probably spend my money on someone else. Good trades workers often aren’t good businesspeople.
That’s kind of what I thought. An encounter with the criminal justice system isn’t helping anybody.
Except that after an incompetent contractor is arrested, he/she might be forced to stop accepting jobs he/she can’t handle. (I assume the contractor license would be revoked/cancelled.) So that helps any future victims.
Yes and no. The people he owes money to might see restitution, but it’s not going to stop him from taking on new jobs. I doubt Crafter_Man checked to make sure his license was good before hiring him.
In large swathes of this country, there’s no such thing as contractor licenses in the first place (that’s “big government meddling”), so nothing to revoke and nothing for future victims to find.
For example, the largest city in my home county licenses contractors working inside city limits. Out in the county, though, there are no rules about who can do work, and precious few about what work can be done. (The county currently has a committee exploring the feasibility of adopting a building code; the committee is not reviewing or recommending specific codes, but just studying whether or not it’s a good idea to have them.)
It kind of morbidly amusing that the only real hope here that fingers are crossed on is that he can steal some else’s advance money to pay back Crafter Man.
Why? He is failing as a businessman but clearly needs something to force him to stop.
OK, I can almost see not having licenses for contractors, although that’s a bad idea.
But your county doesn’t even have building codes? Please let me know where this is so I never move or visit there.
I also find this fascinating. What states require no contractor licenses for builders?
And here is a handy site with the answers. Pretty fascinating.
Shawnee County, Kansas. [Note that the largest city in the county, Topeka,does have and enforce building codes. It’s the rural areas that don’t. This is a pretty common situation in Kansas, and many smaller rural counties have no building codes anywhere in the county. Welcome to Kansas.]
I actually think you’ve done okay with this after your initial mistakes. Because if you had just immediately gone the lawyer or police route I think the odds of him delivering the materials (or returning your money) goes from what I’d say is “20%” to “0%.” Then you’ll be stuck in either a criminal or civil legal process for some time.
I don’t know this guy from Adam, but my hunch based on your dealings with him is he’s a contractor that for whatever reason does not have a line of credit with a supplier and floats materials willy nilly with no respect to who paid for what. It’s normally worked out for him because he finishes jobs enough that people like you don’t get fed up and call the cops on him. To him I doubt he views it as stealing, instead I think he views it sort of as just how he’s operating his business. I think Bonaventure’s friend is the kind of guy we’re talking about.
There are a ton of scam artists in this industry and I’ve worked with many of them. Just taking the money and running is a very short con likely to get you in trouble quickly, further if you’re running that con it makes sense for him to just quit answering your FB messages. It only really makes sense too if it’s a fake facebook account or email address and you can’t actually trace back to a real person. A longer con is for a contractor to fraudulently do work, we have a lot of that around here where guys will guys will roof your house for you and charge you for high quality materials, and they really just do basically “half of the job” with the cheapest materials possible. Usually you’ll have serious leaks and other problems very quickly, and they’re long gone by then. They’ll clear a ton of money on the job because they invest maybe a quarter of the time a real roofing job takes and maybe less than half the money for materials. This is actually a smarter con because these are all fairly difficult and time-consuming to litigate civil cases and most people don’t want to bother.
Additionally to contractors I’ve had a lot of experience with small claims court, at least earlier on. It’s mostly worthless, winning in small claims gives you no real power to collect judgments. For example if they refuse to pay the judgment it’s a whole separate process to get their wages garnished, and I think some states may not even allow garnishment for small claims judgments (this is where talking to a lawyer would help, but that’s further down the process.) A lot of scam artists are functionally judgment proof, too, if that’s what this guy really is.
I think your best hope of getting the money back is what you’ve been doing, keeping open dialogue with him and start applying pressure to make him come up with the money. If he’s an otherwise legitimate but incompetent business person who doesn’t realize the stupidity of what he’s doing financially (or its illegality) then if he starts to fear you may take steps against him it may push him to finding the money or materials and getting them to you. I think your plan to go file a police report next Monday would be the right step–it’s much better if this becomes a criminal matter if it’s legally possible (and your posts indicate in your state that it is.) A criminal charge may very well scare the money out of you, he can absolutely offer to make restitution and you can drop the charges at that point.
Like I said, I don’t think he’s a straight scam artist, or if he is he’s new to it. Real scam artists know better than to give you their real name or even worse their real social media information. Real scam artists use throw away emails on craigslist and when in person they give you false information about who they are. The fact that he hasn’t done this makes me lean much more toward incompetent businessman than outright scam artist.
FWIW the initial mistakes are paying for all materials up front. Most established contractors (even small ones) have lines of credit with local suppliers. In my experience most contractors won’t order materials or start work with no money up front, but because they have a LOC with their suppliers they will typically only require a % downpayment on the total job. So if they give you say a $5000 estimate, half for materials half for labor, I wouldn’t be shocked at a 25-35% downpayment. That puts you both with skin in the game (assuming he’s not outright defrauding you) and since he has a line of credit for the materials it’s not a big deal for him to cover the costs until you settle up. If he’s a good businessman he’s already factored possible interest expense into his business model.
Even a small time contractor who doesn’t have a LOC with a local supplier, that’s a red flag for me. Why doesn’t he have one? Is it because he is too financially inept to know how to apply for one or open one? Or does he have bad credit because he doesn’t manage money well? And thus wouldn’t get approved for one?
Excellent Comments, Martin.
It also occurred to me that, if he ordered the materials this week, he may not order all the materials, e.g. he will order 1/3 or 1/2. So I sent Jeff a message telling him he must deliver 100% of the materials or 100% of the money by this Saturday. I also sent a message to Conover Lumber, requesting that they not to deliver a partial order (though they may have no choice in the matter).
I hope this shitty experience of mine - which is entirely due to ignorance and naivety on my part - is a lesson to others. Don’t do what I did!
The very reason he gave you for needing $2500 up front was that he wanted to buy the materials before the price went up. Obviously that was not done, so the gig is up. There was absolutely no need for him to cash your check back in June, except to cover his OWN bills.
Yikes.
We are building a log cabin in rural Ohio. I spent the better part of an afternoon trying to find out where to file our building permit. I finally got a hold of my county commissioner (the mayor’s office gave me his home phone number), who informed me that “We don’t do that out here. Just do what you want.”
Well, okay.
P.S. We are actually building it to the City of Cincinnati’s code because WE want it to be safe. We figured our insurance agent and potential buyers down the road might require some standard.
When we built in Alabama, our BANK told us “there are no building codes. You can go out and hire yourself a jack-legged electrician and burn your house down for all we care.”
We did not follow this particular piece of advice.
I’m just an SDMB lurker who deals with a lot of contractors, and I’ve been patient, but I need an update here! Did the contractor show up on Saturday? Did the materials?
If there’s a betting pool starting put me down on the “no” side.