Home repair fraud reports track the storms, not the calendar

Why this case matters

Almost every category on this site is going up, often steeply. This one is not.

Year	Reports	Change
2022	10,573	—
2023	12,313	+16%
2024	11,408	−7%

Up sixteen, down seven, ending eight per cent above where it started. Against Immigration Services at +170% and Utilities at +28% over the same two years, that is essentially flat.

Why flat is interesting

Because it tells you what constrains this scheme, and the answer is not the internet.

Digital fraud grows because its marginal cost is near zero. One more romance target, one more phishing message, one more fake investment platform costs the operator almost nothing, so volume expands to fill whatever the defences allow.

Contractor fraud cannot do that. It requires somebody physically present, at a specific damaged house, in a place where a storm has just been. The supply of opportunities is set by weather and by the housing stock, and no amount of automation changes it.

So the curve tracks hurricane and hail seasons rather than technology. 2023’s rise and 2024’s fall are more likely to be about where storms landed than about anything the scammers or the regulators did.

What the number does not tell you

There is no loss figure. The FTC does not publish a total or a median for this category, so the most important dimension is simply absent.

That matters more here than in most categories, because the individual amounts are large. A roof, a foundation, a rebuild — these are five-figure jobs, and an insurance cheque signed over to the wrong person is not a $283 median loss. Eleven thousand reports in this category almost certainly represent more money than a much larger number of reports elsewhere.

We record the count because it exists, and note plainly that the count is the least important half of the picture.

Reading it alongside the rest

One more caution. The category bundles home improvement, repair and solar together, and solar sales complaints are a substantial and largely separate phenomenon — door-to-door sales, financing terms, promised savings that do not arrive.

So this is not a clean measure of storm-chasing contractors. It is the closest federal series that exists, which is a different claim, and the one we are making.