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Protecting Seniors from Contractor Fraud and Rip Offs
 Trusting a Contractor... It doesn’t matter how small or large the community, cases of unsuspecting homeowners losing thousands of dollars to an unscrupulous contractor are reported, and in many cases, go un-reported because the homeowner is too embarrassed. It seems to be especially prevalent within the senior citizen community. Bad contractors have no problem taking advantage of the trust of the elderly. “I saw his ad in my church bulletin, I assumed I could trust him, I thought he was a Christian,” Rene W. recently told her case manager in Ohio as she reluctantly retold the story of hiring a handyman to simply clean her gutters. What started out as a $75 normal home maintenance project, ended up with Rene handing over $7,000 to replace, what she was told, was an emergency fix of roof tiles. She never saw the contractor again. It’s stories like this that inspired Joe Bonilla to begin seeking a solution to the prevalent practice of unscrupulous contractors taking advantage of a vulnerable population when he launched Contractor Screening Services earlier this year. Many of the victims of this kind of fraud perpetrated against the elderly are widowed women in the 80-year-old age bracket. Their husbands had either taken care of the house chores themselves, or handled the process of hiring a contractor. Consequently, these elderly women find themselves at the mercy of contractors unsure of what preliminary questions they ought to begin asking. “It happens more often than one might think.” offers Barbara Mascio, founder of Senior Approved Services. She continues, “Most of the time, the senior is so embarrassed after the fact that these kinds of rip-offs aren’t even reported.” Natural disasters, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, (and the like) often times are followed by the disaster of solicitation by ‘gypsy contractors’. A gypsy contractor is a contractor that moves from one community or state to another. With no real office, and in most cases, no license or business insurance, homeowners are often left with no legal recourse. Senior Approved Services (SAS) offers contractors a screening process to put their businesses through so that potential clients of the contractor can be assured of their business practices and ethics. The driving mission behind SAS is that of senior advocacy, ensuring that all seniors receive excellent services – while remaining safe from all potential harm or fraud. In an effort to better serve the senior, Bonilla and Mascio have agreed to a collaborative partnering with one another’s respective business models. Seniors and their family members will soon be able to review at no charge a listing of Certified Senior Approved contractors directly on the web site for Contractor Screening Services. In the event that there are no Certified Senior Approved contractors providing a service in the local area where the senior happens to need such a service, then the senior may request a full detailed background check through Contractor Screening Services for a small fee. Bonilla states, “The best thing is to be armed with as much information as possible about the contractor before you sign on the dotted line. You should also get quotes from at least 3 different contractors.”
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