A storm chaser is a repair crew that arrives after a disaster, offers a free inspection, and takes money before doing work — usually by asking for full payment up front or for the insurance cheque to be signed over. The FTC names four warning signs, and all four are sentences rather than technical judgements: no licence needed, sign today for a discount, sign over the cheque, pay up front.
Three days after the storm, a truck stops outside and someone offers a free inspection. They are working in the area. They saw the damage from the road. They can start tomorrow, and there is a discount if you sign today.
Sometimes that is a real contractor doing what real contractors do after a storm. Sometimes it is somebody who will take the deposit, or the insurance cheque, and leave the county.
Telling them apart does not require any knowledge of roofing. The FTC lists four things the second kind says, and all four are sentences:
They don’t need to be licensed to do the work. You’ll get a discount, but only if you sign right away. Sign over your insurance check. Pay for everything up front.
Each is a claim a legitimate contractor has no reason to make. Each is checkable from your own driveway.
What makes this scheme hard is not the detection. It is that the person being asked to do the checking has a hole in their roof, no power, an insurance claim they have never made before, and a fortnight of rain forecast.
Working in the area, saw damage from the road, can fit you in today. Frequently before the insurer has been out, so there is no independent record of what the damage actually was.
Sometimes real. Sometimes exaggerated. Occasionally created during the inspection — a homeowner on the ground cannot see what happens on a roof.
Or the discount that expires today. Two of the FTC’s four warning signs, and both are attempts to prevent a check rather than to describe the work.
Where it could have stopped
Licences are verifiable through state or county government, and a genuine price survives a phone call. Same-day-only pricing exists to stop you getting a second quote, checking the licence, or speaking to your insurer — the three things that would end the conversation.
Or an assignment of benefits, which does the same thing. The claim money leaves your control before any work exists to justify it, and the insurer treats the claim as settled.
In cash, by app or by transfer. The FTC’s rule is card or cheque, a reasonable deposit, and no final payment until the work is done.
A partial start is deliberate. Something was done, which converts an outright fraud into a contract dispute — a much harder thing to prosecute and a much easier thing to walk away from.
The company was formed for the season, has no address you can visit, and is not there next month.
The victim is in an emergency. Not a manufactured urgency — a real one, with weather coming and a house that is not weatherproof. Every other scam has to invent the pressure this one arrives inside.
Capacity is genuinely short. After a large storm there are more damaged houses than local contractors, waiting lists are real, and someone who can start tomorrow is offering something valuable.
There is no baseline. If the insurer has not inspected, nobody has an independent record of the damage — which is why arriving first matters so much.
The money is not felt as the homeowner’s. An insurance cheque is money that arrived because something bad happened. Signing it over feels like paperwork rather than like handing over $30,000.
Nobody has done this before. Most people make one major property claim in a lifetime, and have no model of what the process should look like or what a contract should contain.
And a partial start protects the operator. Materials in the driveway and two days of work make it a dispute rather than a theft, which is a different and far weaker legal position for the homeowner.
Domestic, seasonal, and physically constrained — which makes it unlike almost everything else on this site.
It is bounded by weather, not by technology. Reports in the FTC’s Home Improvement, Repair, and Solar category ran at 10,573 in 2022, 12,313 in 2023 and 11,408 in 2024. Flat, while Immigration Services rose 170% and Utilities 28% over the same period. Digital fraud grows because another target costs nothing; this one needs a damaged house in a place a storm has been.
Enforcement is mostly state-level, which is why there is no equivalent here to the federal takedowns on other pages. Contractor licensing, home improvement contract law and cooling-off periods are state matters, and the actions are brought by state attorneys general.
The federal role is coordination and warning. The joint statement of 9 October 2024 from the FTC, the Justice Department and the CFPB names four categories — fake charities, government imposters, bogus recovery businesses and price gouging — and its most pointed line is addressed to companies rather than to consumers: do not use the hurricane as an excuse to exploit people.
And the crews travel. “Storm chaser” is a description of a business model: follow the weather, work a disaster area for a season, register locally if at all, and move on. The mobility is the point, and it is what makes recovery so difficult afterwards.
The FTC's post-disaster contractor guidance lists four things scammers say — that they do not need a licence, that the discount expires today, that you should sign over your insurance cheque, and that they need paying up front. Each is a claim a legitimate contractor has no reason to make, and each is checkable without knowing anything about building work.
On 9 October 2024, with hurricanes making landfall, the FTC, the Justice Department and the CFPB issued a joint warning about disaster scams and price gouging. It names four categories — fake charities, government impersonators, bogus recovery businesses and price gouging — and its framing is unusual: the message is addressed to companies as much as to consumers.
US reports in the FTC's Home Improvement, Repair, and Solar category ran at 10,573 in 2022, 12,313 in 2023 and 11,408 in 2024 — flat, not rising, and unlike almost every other category on this site. That stability is the finding: this scheme is bounded by weather rather than by the internet.
At the door. Do not sign anything, and do not pay anything. Take the company name, the licence number and the vehicle plate. Say your insurer has to inspect first — which is true, and is a complete answer that requires no confrontation.
Then check the licence with your state or county, ask for proof of insurance, and get a second quote. If the offer does not survive that, it was not an offer.
Before you sign. Insist on a written contract containing the contractor’s name, address, phone number and licence number, start and completion dates, a payment schedule, every promise made about scope and cost, and a statement of your cancellation rights — with no blank spaces. A signed contract with blanks can be completed afterwards by whoever holds it.
Pay by credit card or cheque. Never by wire transfer, gift card, payment app, cryptocurrency or cash — card payment also preserves a chargeback, which is the only remedy that does not require a lawyer.
Negotiate a reasonable deposit, and hold the final payment until the work is finished and you are satisfied.
If you have already paid or signed.
Before the next one. This is the part that works, and it has to happen while nothing is wrong. Research contractors now. Search company names with words like “scam” or “complaint”. Read your insurance policy and find out what is covered. Photograph your possessions. Keep documents somewhere you can grab them.
Into a real, local, cash-friendly business — and then out of the county.
There is no laundering step here in the usual sense. Deposits are taken in cash or by transfer to a company account, and an insurance cheque signed over is deposited exactly as a legitimate payment would be. Nothing about the transaction looks unusual to a bank, because structurally nothing is.
What does the concealment is mobility and corporate churn. An entity registered for one season, in one state, with a mobile number and no premises, dissolves or simply stops trading before complaints accumulate. The next storm gets a new name.
That is why the effective remedies here are the ones that operate before the money moves — a card payment that can be disputed, a staged payment schedule, a licence that can be checked — rather than recovery afterwards.
The other half of this story
Our sibling site Clean on Paper explains why the deposit is asked for in cash — and why a trade that handles cash normally is the easiest place for money to disappear without anyone filing anything.
No agency publishes a line item for most of the schemes on this site, so these charts show the official categories that contain this scheme. Each series is labelled with the agency's own category name. See how the mapping works.
No. Signing over the cheque, or signing an assignment of benefits, moves the claim money out of your control before any work exists to justify it. The insurer then treats the claim as settled, and your only remedy against a contractor who does nothing is to sue them. It is the single most damaging signature in this scheme.
That is one of the FTC's four named warning signs, and it is checkable in minutes: licences are verified through state or county government. A contractor who tells you the check is unnecessary has told you what the check would find.
A genuine price survives a phone call. Same-day-only pricing exists to prevent you getting a second quote, checking a licence, or speaking to your insurer — which are exactly the three things that would end the conversation.
Modest, and staged. The FTC advises negotiating a reasonable down payment and notes that some states limit what a contractor may ask for. Never make the final payment until the work is done and you are satisfied, and get invoices and receipts throughout.
That is a scam, with no exceptions. FEMA does not charge application fees. Anyone asking for money to help you qualify for FEMA funds has identified themselves.
Almost all of it has to happen before the storm: research contractors while nothing is wrong, search the company name with words like "scam" or "complaint", check licences and insurance, photograph your possessions and read your policy. A person standing under a hole in their roof has no capacity for any of that, which is the whole design.
Report it
Reporting is what produces the enforcement data on this page. Find the right agency and phone number for your country on the report page. If money moved in the last few hours, call your bank first.