HASLETT - Carrie Green, a Haslett resident, moved into her home back in October of 2014, but is still sleeping on the floor.

"My idea was to get a foreclosed house, do some work to it, fix it up and live in it," Green says. "And we found Brian Gondeck, which is the contractor we originally hired to do some work."

Green says things started out fine.

"He wanted half up front, half at the end, right when the job was finished, what was what most of the other contractors wanted as well," she says. "And then things kind of went down hill."

Green says Gondeck stopped showing up, things started disappearing and he hid when Meridian Township Building Inspector Richard Bolek came to take a look.

"And we kind of were just thinking something wasn't right," Green says. "I had a bad feeling."

Her gut feeling urged her to do some digging and hammer out the details.

"I found his whole criminal background," she says. "There was quite a few false pretenses, which is essentially kind of like fraud. There was assault charges, home invasion, things like that."

$18,000 later and still no word from Gondeck — Green then contacted police.

"I got in contact with another police officer, who was also pursuing him for another case in Meridian Township," Green says.

Combining the two cases — the state of Michigan was able to arrest Gondeck, who posed as a licensed contractor, for false pretenses.

"We've gotten several calls lately from people who have started projects and have not obtained a permit or have hired contractors who are not licensed," said Meridian Township Building Inspector Richard Bolek.

Bolek says in most of these cases, including Green's. residents have been forced to start from scratch with a licensed contractor.

"The biggest thing we can do is education — is to get the word out to people about unlicensed contractors, about the methods that they can go about to find out if a person's licensed or not," he says.

Bolek says to ask to see a contractor's license, liability insurance, as well as work comp insurance to prevent thins from happening.

"Then other people don't have to suffer the same thing I did," Green says.