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Home-improvement fraud is not a niche crime. Homeowners filed 81,925 home-improvement scam reports with the FTC in 2024, and the Better Business Bureau puts the average loss around $1,800 per scam. And those figures only count what gets reported as fraud — not the much larger gray zone of lowball bids, vanished deposits, and abandoned half-projects that never make it into anyone's statistics.
Here's the encouraging part: contractor scams are astonishingly unoriginal. The same handful of scripts have run for decades, because they keep working on people who haven't seen them before. Read them once and you'll recognize them for the rest of your life. So let's read them.
The storm chaser. Within days of a hailstorm, hurricane, or hard freeze, a truck you've never seen is in your driveway: they're “working several roofs in the neighborhood,” they've spotted damage on yours, and they can start immediately — with a deposit. Some are legitimate out-of-area crews; many are neither. They collect deposits across a damaged region, do rushed or cosmetic work or none at all, and are two states away before the tarps blow off. The tell isn't the storm — it's the combination of unsolicited contact, immediate availability, and money today.
The driveway sealer — and the “leftover materials” family. A crew knocks: they just finished a job nearby and have leftover asphalt, sealcoat, or paving material — enough to do your driveway at a bargain, today only. The “material” is often little more than a cosmetic coat that washes away with the season, and the crew is gone by then. Any pitch built on leftover materials + today only + cash is this scam wearing one of its outfits.
“We'll cover your deductible.” After a storm, a roofer offers to make your insurance claim painless: he'll inflate the invoice or fudge the paperwork so you don't pay your deductible. Understand what's being proposed: insurance fraud, with your signature on the claim. Homeowners have ended up not just with bad roofs but with real legal exposure — and several states have made deductible-waiving schemes specifically illegal. A contractor who volunteers to deceive your insurer for you has told you exactly how he treats paperwork against you.
The vanishing deposit. The oldest one: a persuasive bid, a demand for half or more up front, a start date that slips, then a phone that rings into nothing. Sometimes it's fraud from the first handshake; sometimes it's an insolvent business using your deposit to close out someone else's job until the music stops. From your side of the table the distinction barely matters — and the defense is identical: small deposits, milestone payments, and the money-behind-the-work discipline explained in the deposit guide.
The discovered catastrophe. A small job — a cleaning, an inspection, a minor repair — and suddenly your helpful visitor has found something terrifying: mold in the crawlspace, a cracked heat exchanger, a foundation “about to go.” The fear is the product; the emergency price is the invoice. Real problems get found this way too, which is exactly what makes it effective — so the rule isn't “disbelieve,” it's verify independently: a second opinion from someone with no stake in the repair, before any money moves.
Strip the costumes and there are three moving parts, and you can watch for the parts instead of memorizing the plots.
Urgency. Today-only pricing, crews leaving tomorrow, damage that can't wait for a second opinion. Legitimate contractors are busy people who schedule work; scammers need you deciding faster than you can check. Any pressure to decide before you can verify is, by itself, a reason not to.
Unverifiability. No license number offered, no fixed business address, out-of-state plates, a company name that returns nothing when searched, cash or peer-to-peer payment apps only. Every one of those removes a thread you could pull.
Money ahead of work. Whatever the story, the ask is the same: substantial payment before substantial work. It's the engine of the entire genre — which is why milestone-payment discipline defeats most of the genre without your ever needing to diagnose which scam you're looking at.
Five checks, none requiring more than a phone and a browser, run before any money moves:
If you'd rather not keep the whole checklist in your head, the Contractor Protection Package includes a red-flag scorecard — run any contractor, contract, and payment demand through it and get a risk rating with every flag explained, plus the fix for each — The Contractor Protection Package ($39).
Move quickly and on paper. Stop all further payments immediately — whatever the story, no more money. If you paid by credit card recently, call the issuer about a dispute; if by check and it hasn't cleared, call your bank now. Document everything while it's fresh: the contract or flyer, texts, the state of any work, names, truck descriptions, plate numbers if you have them.
Then report it — not as an act of civic virtue, though it is one, but because reports create records that help you: your state attorney general and contractor licensing board (some states run recovery funds that compensate victims of licensed contractors), the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, and local police if you've been defrauded outright. If the work was started and abandoned rather than never begun, you're in slightly different territory with its own sequence — documentation, written demand, deadline — laid out in the unfinished-job guide.
And one kindness for yourself: these schemes work on smart people. They're refined by repetition against thousands of households a year — that's what 81,925 reports means. Being caught by a professional deceiver is not a character flaw; staying quiet about it is just a gift to the next address on his list.
No — canvassing is a real marketing tactic, especially for roofing after storms. But unsolicited contact means you didn't choose them, so the verification burden goes up, not down. Take the flyer, say you don't decide same-day, and run the full five checks. A legitimate canvasser survives that easily; the other kind never returns.
Avoid it for anything meaningful. Cash leaves no trail — no proof you paid, no dispute rights, nothing for a court or licensing board to look at. A discount offered specifically for cash is often a discount for making you unprotected (and sometimes for keeping the job off the books). Pay the business, traceably.
Skip none of them — friend-of-a-friend hires are behind some of the worst project disasters precisely because the recommendation replaces the vetting. Your friend vouches for one experience, not for current insurance, license status, or the state of the contractor's business this year. The checks take an afternoon. Run them anyway.
Start with your state's contractor licensing board (search the state name plus “contractor license lookup”), which typically shows status, classification, and discipline. Add your state attorney general's consumer complaint database where one exists, the BBB, and a plain search of the business name plus “complaint” or “scam.” Fifteen minutes, total.
81,925 households reported a home-improvement scam last year. The patterns are old — learn to spot every one of them.
Get the Contractor Protection Package — $39 Instant download · Yours forever · All sales finalEducational information, not legal advice. Laws and practices vary by state and change over time; verify anything you intend to rely on, and consult a licensed professional in your state for advice about your specific situation.