Crooked contractor gets his
I’ve posted before about the experience I had with a dishonest contractor but I’ve never posted the eventual results…
When we finally realized the guy was not coming back to finish the job (which was a relief in a way because the quality of his work was crap) we took a measured approach in an attempt to recover our money or get him to finish the job.
We wrote him a number of registered letters detailing the issues and requesting him to fix them. Everything was explained clearly and professionally as I realized that I was writing to a potential prosecutor or judge as much as I was writing to the crook himself.
When he failed to respond or address the issues, we reviewed our legal options. Suing him directly was written off as a bad idea since he was in all likliehood “judgement proof”, with nothing in his name and no bank accounts. Going this route would be throwing good money after bad. The cops couldn’t charge him since they viewed this as a contract dispute, however a government body that looks after consumer interest did investigate and decided to charge him.
Long story short, he was convicted after 3 years in the court system, sentenced to 21 days in jail and ordered to make restitution payments. There is another funny story in all this on how he went to jail but I’ll save that for another time.
If only I had had access to a site like Toronto General Contractor Reviews when I was looking for a contractor, I could have avoided the whole nightmare.