Deadbeat contractor scammed 3 people after Coventry couple’s complaint
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A Coventry couple who paid a contractor $60,000 for a job he spent 2½ years on but never finished filed a complaint eight months before the state finally suspended the contractors’ registration late last month.
During the time it took to pull the registration, three more customers were scammed by the same contractor.
Pam Barbosa reached out to The Hummel Report after reading an investigation published earlier this month in The Providence Sunday Journal about another couple in town that was fleeced by Raymond Oliver, owner of T&R Construction. In that case, Oliver took a $21,000 deposit from Linda and Bob Walton in April for a $60,000 first-floor addition but never began the job.
Background:Hummel Report — Deadbeat contractor leaves Coventry couple in limbo
The Rhode Island Contractors’ Registration and Licensing Board received two more complaints over the summer and finally issued an emergency order suspending Oliver’s registration on Oct. 27. Pam and Edward Barbosa, who spent tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees trying to get Oliver to complete the work, filed a formal complaint with the contractors’ board Feb. 11, shortly after they’d had enough of his repeated broken promises.
“We felt awful,” Pam Barbosa said this week. “How could you ever remortgage your house to get another contractor to come in with the way our house looks?”
Barbosa wants to know why the board did not move more quickly to pull Oliver’s registration, noting that if it…
