Here is a business model so elegant, so perfectly optimized for maximum profit with minimum accountability, that it makes cryptocurrency look like a regulated utility.
Christian Williams, a rogue builder in Lanzarote, managed to extract £160,000 from clients for construction work. The roof leaked. The work was, by any reasonable definition, not done. So the courts ordered him to pay back the money.
He paid back £1.
One pound. Not a typo. Not a down payment. A single British pound, which at current exchange rates is approximately what you’d find in a sofa if you looked hard enough.
The arithmetic here is so brazen it loops back around to being almost admirable. He kept £159,999 and spent it on the kind of extended holiday in Lanzarote that most of us finance by pretending we are not doing it. Meanwhile, his clients learned a valuable lesson about the construction industry: it is apparently a sector where you can take six figures, deliver nothing, and the enforcement mechanism is ceremonial.
This is not a failure of the builder—he succeeded brilliantly at what he was doing. This is a failure of a system where the penalty for stealing via bad workmanship is so trivial that it functions as a price list rather than a deterrent. The court ordered repayment. He paid £1. The system is now complete.
If you are planning a renovation, perhaps budget an extra 0.6% for the likelihood that your contractor will simply keep the money and move to Spain.