A friend of mine paid a roofer a $4,000 deposit in March. The quote looked professional, the man turned up in a van with signage, and the reviews on the website were glowing. The van was rented. The website had been registered eleven days earlier. The phone number had belonged to a hairdresser in a different state until about six weeks before that.
None of that was hidden. All of it was checkable in under five minutes. Nobody checked.
So: five things worth confirming before money changes hands.
1. The name on the quote is a real person
Start here because everything else depends on it. You want the name the contractor gives you to attach to a real identity with a history — an address trail, a consistent record over years, the ordinary boring footprint that a person who has lived somewhere accumulates.
Sole traders often quote under a trading name rather than their own. That is completely normal and not a red flag. What you want is to be able to connect the trading name to a person, and then check that person.
2. The address holds up
A business address that turns out to be a mail drop is not automatically sinister. Plenty of legitimate one-man operations use one, and plenty of tradespeople work out of a home they would rather not publish.
What you are looking for is consistency. Does the address have any history connected to this person, or did it appear the same month the business did? A contractor with eight years at one address and a contractor whose entire paper trail starts in the spring are different propositions, and you should price the deposit accordingly.
3. Public records
Court filings, judgments, liens, criminal matters where they exist and are public. For contractors the civil side is often more telling than the criminal side — a pattern of disputes with previous clients tends to show up as filings long before it shows up in reviews.
One judgment from 2014 is noise. Four filings in three years, all from customers, is a pattern. Read the dates and count.
4. The phone number belongs to them
This is the one that catches people, and it caught my friend.
Carriers recycle disconnected numbers — sometimes after as little as 45 days. So a number can look settled and established while having belonged to the person quoting you for barely a month. If the name registered to the number does not match the name on the quote, that is worth a direct question before anything else happens.
It is also the cheapest check on this list. Reverse phone number lookup covers how the registration history works.
5. The online footprint is older than the job
Look at the age of things, not the polish. A website registered a fortnight ago with twenty five-star reviews is worse than a scruffy Facebook page that has been posting job photos since 2019. Reviews are trivial to manufacture. Time is not.
Same logic for the email address. An address created recently, with no footprint anywhere else, on a quote for several thousand dollars, deserves a second look.
What to do with it
Run the check before the deposit, not after the first invoice goes unanswered. It takes a couple of minutes and costs about thirty dollars, which against a four-figure deposit is not a real decision.
And if something comes back that you do not like — ask. Most of the time there is a dull explanation and you get on with the job. The point is not to catch people out. It is to make sure you recieve the work you are paying for, from the person you think you are paying.
Verify someone runs the check, or contractor background check walks through the whole thing in more detail.
- Contractor background check — what to verify before the deposit or the keys
- Verify someone — start a lookup with a name and a phone or email
- How a report is built — the six checks and the Clear / Review / Flag verdict
Sources & further reading: Reverse phone number lookup · Recycled phone numbers: a hidden risk in screening pipelines · Our data platform