Signed a contract for excavation work and filling in of inground pool on 10/31/18. Work was to start on 11/4, with a deposit of $1000 due up front and the remaining $1100 due upon completion. On 11/2, contractor (who has a handyman license issues through the City of Morgantown, not a state contractors license, but business is registered through the state) texts and says the clutch went out on his dump truck, and he needs another $400 up front to fix and would take it off my total due.
At that point, I became suspicious as to why a contractor doesn't have $400 to fix a piece of equipment vital to their business. As I feared, he never showed up, I called repeatedly. Only after threatening further action did he answer to tell me he was supposedly hospitalized.
I asked when he anticipates starting, at time is of the essence and advised if he did not start the project outlined in the contract, I would need my deposit back, and now he won't answer. Am I correct in thinking that since he took the money and never delivered material nor started work and won't answer, this constitutes some sort of fraud or fraudulent schemes (as opposed to an unfinished or shoddy job, civil matter)https://services.oca.state.ma.us/hic/licdetails.aspx?txtSearchLN=87018
We contracted Darryl Cunningham for $20,000.00 to finish our basement. on his first visit he requested $4000.00 to get the material.
He got the material for almost $650.00 (later on I went to Home depot to check on the cost of material he bought). From that day our nightmare started.
He is a scammer. He dropped of his workers ( which he found from Craiglsit) the next day. One of the worker is a convicted criminal. They came for 3 days for approx 4 hrs each. When darryl come to pick them up he was bitching about his workers and how unprofessional they are. That his problem.
They came again next week for few hrs, Next week Darryl told me that he is getting lots of material and will need a check of another $6000.00. His tactics is to buy cheap BULKY material to look like lot of mterial is bought. Only thing he did was framing in basement. for $10,000.00 I had only framing complete. To do more work he asked for another 4000.00 I told him that the work dome is nothing, he gave all the excuses that other project is wining up and all of his workers will be available from next week. According to him it was to speed up next week.
Next week came,he got 3 workers and texted me that need another 4000.00.I told me that I need to see work before I give more money to him and that started the confrontation. After 4 days I gave him 3500.00 more (Total of $17500.00) as he promised that by giving $3500.00 he will wrap it up in 3 weeks. We never saw him after that.
We found his ad on Craigslist and called him. He is well spoken over the phone. He showed up and made a good impression. He was very personable and appears to be knowledgeable. We had him draw up a contract to repair and replace boards as needed and paint 2 decks, paint a shed and replace a 80 foot wood fence with new vinyl fence. $5750 agreed price. $2000 down, $1750 at the halfway mark and $2000 upon completion. Right away we noticed that Darryl didn't actually show up for the work instead he dropped off his employee named George. He literally dropped him off, with no tools and drove away. George spent 2-3 days painting the small garage. We were happy with that work. Then George started on the big deck. Instead of sanding the deck he simply repainted over the old paint and it looks very obvious. He took some boards and laid them across my lawn chairs to paint getting paint all over the chairs. Instead of adjusting the tension rod on the deck gate door, he installed a shim. He also attached flat boards on top of the deck railing to make a ledge all the way around the deck. Those boards were not level and they didn't even butt up to each other. The deck looked like a complete hack job.
Then George spilled paint on my driveway and proceeded to blast the paint with the hose which resulted in paint splattering up onto my motorcycle trailer . We did not make an issue out of that . We asked him to install white lattice under the deck. The first lattice he bought was completely wrong so he bought new lattice. He ripped off the old lattice under the deck and left under the deck completely wide open for my dogs to get under the deck. The lattice was leaning up against my house for almost 2 weeks. It never did get installed. We also had a small deck that he was supposed to do the same work on. On that deck we had a couple rotten boards so he pulled up the rotten boards and left the deck without the boards for 3 days. We had to ask him to please replace the boards because it was incredibly unsafe. What kind of contractor would pull up deck flooring and not replace it right away and instead leave it there like that for 3 days for someone or the dogs to get hurt on?
By this point we are starting to regret our decision for hiring him. Keep in mind that Darryl still hasnt done any work. The most work Darryl has done at this point is apologizing and making excuses for the hack messy job is employee has done so far. This little amount of work (painring shed, spilling paint, slapping paint on deck) has taken 2 weeks so far. We start telling him that we're getting anxious for the job to wrap up. It was not a lot of work but at this point only one to two hours a day is actually being done. So both of my decks are unfinished, the small shed is completely painted and now he starts on the fence. At this point he request the second installment of payment for $1,750. We had a feeling once we gave him that money we would never see him again. We gave it to him. The old fence was taken down and George helped himself to our post digger from our shed! He started digging holes for the new fence post. We thought it was very very odd to dig all the holes especially since he didn't even have a tape measure.
So now Darryl is working with George and they brought a third person to help dig the holes and install the fence post. So the wooden fence posts were installed. They were all different widths and not straight. We are very very concerned at this point since all the panels are one with an all of the spaces between the fence posts are not. Then Darryl starts telling us how he doesn't feel good. On Monday Darryl did show up and work for one hour. He installed one single panel completely crooked and left. The next day he never called never showed up. Around 4 p.m. we received the text message supposedly from his wife telling us that Darryl was in the hospital having an allergic reaction to some medication. Unless you're in a coma you can move your thumbs to text yourself we thought it was very suspicious and I'm professional that his wife was texting. we asked him through text if he was coming back and he said he was going to try to come the next day. At this point we knew we would never see him again. And we were right. We are left with 2 unfinished decks, a painted single-car garage, insufficient materials to replace the deck ourselves(yes...he didn't even buy enough fencing materials and now we have to spend even more money) and crooked fence posts sticking out of the ground. That is hardly $3,750 worth of work.
I have filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau and will file complaints wherever I can so no one else falls victim to this hack. Since this has happene to us I have Googled him and found multiple other complaints just like mine but other people lost a lot more money than we did. I guess we could consider ourselves lucky but we are still a victim and I still would not want anyone else to have to deal with this lying crook. He never pulled a permit and his Contractor License has been terminated. Shame on me for not doing my due diligence before we hired him. If enough people put their story out about this guy MAYBE possibly eventually he will find an honest line of work that doesn't involve scamming people out of their hard-earned money.
Darryl Cunningham Reviews
Signed a contract for excavation work and filling in of inground pool on 10/31/18. Work was to start on 11/4, with a deposit of $1000 due up front and the remaining $1100 due upon completion. On 11/2, contractor (who has a handyman license issues through the City of Morgantown, not a state contractors license, but business is registered through the state) texts and says the clutch went out on his dump truck, and he needs another $400 up front to fix and would take it off my total due.
At that point, I became suspicious as to why a contractor doesn't have $400 to fix a piece of equipment vital to their business. As I feared, he never showed up, I called repeatedly. Only after threatening further action did he answer to tell me he was supposedly hospitalized.
I asked when he anticipates starting, at time is of the essence and advised if he did not start the project outlined in the contract, I would need my deposit back, and now he won't answer. Am I correct in thinking that since he took the money and never delivered material nor started work and won't answer, this constitutes some sort of fraud or fraudulent schemes (as opposed to an unfinished or shoddy job, civil matter)https://services.oca.state.ma.us/hic/licdetails.aspx?txtSearchLN=87018
We contracted Darryl Cunningham for $20,000.00 to finish our basement. on his first visit he requested $4000.00 to get the material.
He got the material for almost $650.00 (later on I went to Home depot to check on the cost of material he bought). From that day our nightmare started.
He is a scammer. He dropped of his workers ( which he found from Craiglsit) the next day. One of the worker is a convicted criminal. They came for 3 days for approx 4 hrs each. When darryl come to pick them up he was bitching about his workers and how unprofessional they are. That his problem.
They came again next week for few hrs, Next week Darryl told me that he is getting lots of material and will need a check of another $6000.00. His tactics is to buy cheap BULKY material to look like lot of mterial is bought. Only thing he did was framing in basement. for $10,000.00 I had only framing complete. To do more work he asked for another 4000.00 I told him that the work dome is nothing, he gave all the excuses that other project is wining up and all of his workers will be available from next week. According to him it was to speed up next week.
Next week came,he got 3 workers and texted me that need another 4000.00.I told me that I need to see work before I give more money to him and that started the confrontation. After 4 days I gave him 3500.00 more (Total of $17500.00) as he promised that by giving $3500.00 he will wrap it up in 3 weeks. We never saw him after that.
We were scammed by him. He is a BIG SCAMMER.
Check his post
We found his ad on Craigslist and called him. He is well spoken over the phone. He showed up and made a good impression. He was very personable and appears to be knowledgeable. We had him draw up a contract to repair and replace boards as needed and paint 2 decks, paint a shed and replace a 80 foot wood fence with new vinyl fence. $5750 agreed price. $2000 down, $1750 at the halfway mark and $2000 upon completion. Right away we noticed that Darryl didn't actually show up for the work instead he dropped off his employee named George. He literally dropped him off, with no tools and drove away. George spent 2-3 days painting the small garage. We were happy with that work. Then George started on the big deck. Instead of sanding the deck he simply repainted over the old paint and it looks very obvious. He took some boards and laid them across my lawn chairs to paint getting paint all over the chairs. Instead of adjusting the tension rod on the deck gate door, he installed a shim. He also attached flat boards on top of the deck railing to make a ledge all the way around the deck. Those boards were not level and they didn't even butt up to each other. The deck looked like a complete hack job.
Then George spilled paint on my driveway and proceeded to blast the paint with the hose which resulted in paint splattering up onto my motorcycle trailer . We did not make an issue out of that . We asked him to install white lattice under the deck. The first lattice he bought was completely wrong so he bought new lattice. He ripped off the old lattice under the deck and left under the deck completely wide open for my dogs to get under the deck. The lattice was leaning up against my house for almost 2 weeks. It never did get installed. We also had a small deck that he was supposed to do the same work on. On that deck we had a couple rotten boards so he pulled up the rotten boards and left the deck without the boards for 3 days. We had to ask him to please replace the boards because it was incredibly unsafe. What kind of contractor would pull up deck flooring and not replace it right away and instead leave it there like that for 3 days for someone or the dogs to get hurt on?
By this point we are starting to regret our decision for hiring him. Keep in mind that Darryl still hasnt done any work. The most work Darryl has done at this point is apologizing and making excuses for the hack messy job is employee has done so far. This little amount of work (painring shed, spilling paint, slapping paint on deck) has taken 2 weeks so far. We start telling him that we're getting anxious for the job to wrap up. It was not a lot of work but at this point only one to two hours a day is actually being done. So both of my decks are unfinished, the small shed is completely painted and now he starts on the fence. At this point he request the second installment of payment for $1,750. We had a feeling once we gave him that money we would never see him again. We gave it to him. The old fence was taken down and George helped himself to our post digger from our shed! He started digging holes for the new fence post. We thought it was very very odd to dig all the holes especially since he didn't even have a tape measure.
So now Darryl is working with George and they brought a third person to help dig the holes and install the fence post. So the wooden fence posts were installed. They were all different widths and not straight. We are very very concerned at this point since all the panels are one with an all of the spaces between the fence posts are not. Then Darryl starts telling us how he doesn't feel good. On Monday Darryl did show up and work for one hour. He installed one single panel completely crooked and left. The next day he never called never showed up. Around 4 p.m. we received the text message supposedly from his wife telling us that Darryl was in the hospital having an allergic reaction to some medication. Unless you're in a coma you can move your thumbs to text yourself we thought it was very suspicious and I'm professional that his wife was texting. we asked him through text if he was coming back and he said he was going to try to come the next day. At this point we knew we would never see him again. And we were right. We are left with 2 unfinished decks, a painted single-car garage, insufficient materials to replace the deck ourselves(yes...he didn't even buy enough fencing materials and now we have to spend even more money) and crooked fence posts sticking out of the ground. That is hardly $3,750 worth of work.
I have filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau and will file complaints wherever I can so no one else falls victim to this hack. Since this has happene to us I have Googled him and found multiple other complaints just like mine but other people lost a lot more money than we did. I guess we could consider ourselves lucky but we are still a victim and I still would not want anyone else to have to deal with this lying crook. He never pulled a permit and his Contractor License has been terminated. Shame on me for not doing my due diligence before we hired him. If enough people put their story out about this guy MAYBE possibly eventually he will find an honest line of work that doesn't involve scamming people out of their hard-earned money.
I am also one of the victim of Darryl Cunningham. He promised me remodeling work and took $4000.00 from me as a deposit.
He never returned my call or started the work.