‘They then began destroying the interior of the home, claiming to find more problems and asking for more money’
Hughie Antony O’Donoghue (24) and Michael Nevin (21) were arrested last week in Maynard, a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, after an investigation that took place over several months.
“The scam is they basically go around looking for dilapidated residences and then look up who the homeowner is,” Police Chief Michael Noble said.
“They go to the home, and they give them a name of someone else on the street. They say they just worked on so-and-so’s house and noticed you had some work to be done.”
According to local media, the two suspects, neither of whom have home improvement licenses, agreed to do some work for an “affordable price”.
“However, they then began destroying the interior of the home, claiming to find more problems and asking for more money,” the Metro West Daily News reports.
They quote the police chief as saying: “They create part of the problem by ripping things down and say they found water damage or something else and they say it’s going to cost another $10,000.
“They don’t ask for the large sum all at once, they do it incrementally and the homeowner feels like they have to do it.”
The news site reports that the Building Department estimated that the original job the men agreed to complete should have cost about $5,000.
The pair were already under investigation by Brockton police who contacted their colleagues in Maynard.
Police there found the resident who confirmed he had paid the suspects who had since stopped working and were no longer responding, Noble said.
A search for the pair in June could not locate them and it is believed that the suspects had used several different aliases, including combining their names.
Police found a residence in Wayland where the suspects lived, but they had been evicted for not paying rent.
Police tracked down the pair to a hotel in Braintree, where they were arrested, Noble said. It was later discovered the two men had warrants from Ireland for allegedly running the same type of scam.
Both men have been charged with larceny of more than $1,200 from a person older than 60; conspiracy to commit a crime; and being an unlicensed home improvement contractor.
They were held on $15,000 bail after their arraignments last week in Concord District Court but under bail conditions they must surrender their passports and wear a GPS monitoring bracelet.