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We hear stories like this all the time, but it still blows my mind…

How do people who work in the construction industry think that they can be shady and believe that the word won’t get out about them?

It sounds pretty stupid, don’t you think?

But it happens over and over and over again…

Check out what happened when a man found out a contractor was screwing him over…and then it was revenge time.

Contractor procrastinates for profit, gets prison.

“This is something that happened to my grandfather.

To understand him, he was a quality control engineer for a pretty major manufacturing firm, and he was a master of aggressively renegotiating deals.

You didn’t want to mess around with this guy…

He was and is a strict task master, not entitled or unreasonable, but if something went wrong, there would be hell to pay.

So, he decided that he wanted to renovate his home, take the moderately-big two story house and add two new bedrooms and a master bath.

He brings in a contractor and gets a quote, says as part of the work they’ll need to completely refinish the front, too.

Grandfather agrees and they start work.

It’s a serious effort, winds up carving open the whole front of the house and all sorts of madness. Things go well enough at first, the destruction goes smoothly.

Then they start construction.

This didn’t get off to a good start…

At first things were just slow going, sluggish delivery from sources, slow permits from the city, you get the idea. Then things get silly. It took them over three months to start and finish the plumbing.

Four months for the insulation. My grandfather is paying for a lot of time and not a lot of work done. He’s irritated about the speed, but besides making some noise there’s not really much to be done about it. Bit by bit, the house starts to come together.

Oh, no…

Then, as they’re putting on the weather-proofing, an inspector comes in and puts a stop to the whole affair. The contractor had improperly filed the plans.

Now, my grandfather is pretty furious by this point, but he keeps a cool enough head, starts asking what’s going to be done about it with the contractor.

The thinking was that they redraft the plans and send them out for reapproval. Contractor says he’ll do it.

FIVE MONTHS go by.

The house is just sitting there, fancy new framework still hanging in the breeze. Then, all of a sudden, the contractor says he’s pulling out.

He had no idea the hell he’d unleashed.

This wasn’t gonna be pretty!

My grandfather didn’t just jump straight to suing him. Oh no sir.

He took his time before even getting a lawyer. He did his homework.

He tracked down every single client that this guy had had for the last three years and did a deep dive on the books to figure out what the hell happened. Turns out that this wasn’t an isolated incident, just the most egregious.

As it happens, this contractor had a penchant for screwing people over, turning minor renovation jobs into complete dumpster fires.

His modus operandi was to file the changes with the city, make a private second set of plans, start making things based off the second set, intentionally let the city halt the construction, then restart the project on a third draft.

He was about to get his!

After talking to some of the other customers, he and eight of the other victims collectively filed charges against him.

They annihilated this guy.

They took every cent he had (which wasn’t that much, his scheme hadn’t actually done him that much good), liquidated his company, sent him to something like fifteen years in prison for fraud, and got the state to help recoup expenses.

Two months later, a new contracting company blitzed my grandfather’s renovations and he was able to drink in his master suite to toast his revenge.”

Reddit users shared their thoughts.

This reader weighed in.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a home buyer who was surprised to learn his neighbors were upset about him removing a fence.

And another individual spoke up.

Play stupid games and you’ll win stupid prizes!

This guy got what was coming to him…

No doubt about it!

This was one homeowner that this contractor shouldn’t have messed with!