This story was originally published by The Florida Trib.

Mary Bennett-Harvey thought she was being clever. The Jacksonville resident found home-repair contractor Lickety Split through a flyer in the mail that included a coupon for an A/C system inspection. Why wait, she thought, until the systems aren’t working to get them checked out.

“[They had] fancy trucks all painted up and looking very corporate and like they knew what they were doing,” she recalled in an interview.

Bennett-Harvey, 76, made an appointment with Lickety Split in May 2025, just six months after her husband passed away, to inspect the A/C systems at the Arlington home they shared for 30 years. She said the inspectors told her both her upstairs and downstairs systems needed entirely new duct work even though she had never noticed a problem.

“In retrospect, I think they must have turned the air conditioning off. It was getting hot in the house,” she said. “They said that they really needed to fix all the duct work, and they needed $20,000 to do that.”

Bennett-Harvey said she couldn’t pay that price, but the contractors told her they would find her a personal loan.

“They had me sign the loan papers on the iPad. I never saw it. I never got a copy of it,” she said. “There was nothing said about ‘Read this here. Now read that carefully. Did you understand it?’ There was none of that. It was just ‘sign it right here. See this little dot right here. Just sign next to that dot.’”

Bennett-Harvey said she believed she was taking out a personal loan, but Lickety Split locked her into a home equity loan on the house she had serviced. She sold the house in October 2025. Bennett-Harvey said she thought the loan was only against her so she didn’t bring it up during the sale, and the title company didn’t find it.

She said she didn’t find out until June 2026 that there is a lien on the house.

“They caught me hook, line and sinker,” Bennett-Harvey said.

For years, Florida regulators have warned people to be wary of which home repair contractor they hire. The state, a mecca for retirees and a magnet for hurricanes, has long had a reputation as a hotbed for scammers, particularly in seasonal home repair work.

But lawyers who specialize in consumer protection say this is not just the result of bad actors and eager marks.

Florida law allows contractors with lengthy records of complaints — including accusations from state officials of deceptive and illegal business practices — to obtain and keep a state license, which is marketed to residents as the gold standard for reliability. And once a contractor has that license, it’s hard to lose.

Officials with the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR), which is responsible for issuing and renewing state contractor licenses, have the power to suspend licenses for misconduct, but they have yet to do so for two home-repair companies with extensive accusations of deceptive business practices: Lickety Split and Florida Roof Specialists.

The Florida Attorney General’s office told The Florida Trib it’s investigating Lickety Split after receiving 92 complaints about the company’s business practices. Late last year, its consumer-protections attorneys sued Florida Roof Specialists after investigating nearly 200 complaints.

On July 24, the office filed an injunction asking the judge to force Florida Roof Specialists to stop operating while the suit is litigated, citing a “growing and disturbing trend in the number of liens and foreclosure actions improperly and/or unlawfully instituted by [Florida Roof Specialists] against Florida consumers over the past 20 months.”

But an attorney general lawsuit is the lengthy last line of defense for consumers.

Lawyers who have represented cheated Floridians say these gaps in the law and enforcement have left residents — especially older homeowners — vulnerable to cons.

Interviews with a dozen customers of the two companies and with seven lawyers with experience helping scammed Floridians recoup losses, as well as a review of numerous official and court records, lawsuits, contracts, and emails between insurers and contractors, shows that these alleged home-repair scams follow a similar pattern: A door-to-door salesman or couponed mailer shows up to an elderly person’s home in the wake of a major storm, urging them to allow a quick home inspection. That inspection inevitably reveals major problems, and the salesman presents what sounds like a great offer through a flurry of documents, or sometimes through an urgent monologue and blank tablet to sign. Unwittingly, in those few minutes, these customers get entrapped into huge loans or expensive legal proceedings.

In each case, the companies’ license number is prominently displayed on their website or at the top of their contracts and waivers.

DBPR says their resources are limited and the department “strives to allocate the use of those resources to maximize the safety, health, and welfare of Floridians and those who visit and do business in our great state.”

The Florida Trib repeatedly attempted to reach the Department of Business and Professional Regulation for comment. DBPR officials initially said the department does not conduct interviews with the media and asked for a list of written questions, which the Trib provided.

The department has not answered those questions or responded to multiple follow-up messages. Neither did the two contracting companies, Lickety Split and Florida Roof Specialists, despite numerous efforts to reach them.

The license loophole

In both the number of reported complaints of fraud and the millions of dollars in personal income lost to scams, Florida ranks among the worst in the United States, according to national data. And local police departments across the state reported a surge in door-to-door solicitation scams this year.

In 2025, the Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR) investigated over 4,800 complaints of unlicensed activity and completed around 2,000 enforcement actions. The same year, the department revoked just one company’s license for deceptive practices, according to a January press release.

DBPR also invested $300,000 into a statewide public education campaign to raise awareness of the importance of hiring licensed professionals in 2025. The campaign got 24 million impressions. Part of it was a series of billboards placed statewide with a simple slogan: “Don’t be a victim a second time. Hire a licensed contractor.”

“There’s a certain level of technical expertise that you expect out of [a licensed contractor]. There’s a certain level of organizational competence there to expect,” said Annie Rodriguez, an attorney with the Jacksonville Area Legal Aid’s Consumer and Advocacy Litigation Unit. “Sometimes people’s money is still gone in the wind, even if they use a licensed contractor.”

DBPR’s rules to obtain and renew a state license include check-ins on testing requirements and the financial health of the company, but they do not include checks into consumer complaints against a prospective company or litigation against them, leaving Florida’s door wide open to contractors with good experience and bad intentions. And there are few ways for the state to hold bad actors accountable.

DBPR says it posts violation complaints under a company’s business license on the department’s website, and encourages Floridians to check them before hiring a contractor. But a Florida Trib review showed this is only done sporadically. Only one of Lickety Split’s three licenses, its A/C license, has a complaint listed. No details are provided about the violation and it is marked as closed, with no information about whether the department took any action over the violation.

Brenda Fee, a 65-year-old Jacksonville resident, said she was scammed by Lickety Split and trapped into an inflated bill for a replacement A/C compressor. She said that after her experience with the company, she reported them to DBPR.

“The DBPR guy called me back. He said they can’t do anything about price gouging,” Fee said. “But he noticed that on the paperwork I sent them that they didn’t have their license number on it, and then he said he noticed it’s not on their vehicles either, so he was going to report them for that.”

There was no such violation listed at the time of publication.

The department’s inaction puts more pressure on the attorney general’s office to bring lawsuits against them, which take years to put together and litigate.

While the attorney general’s office said in an email to The Florida Trib that it is investigating 92 consumer complaints against Lickety Split, it has already sued another contracting company, Florida Roof Specialists, which the office received 209 complaints about as of July 17.

“They’re just a step above the spammers and the scammers that you’re getting in your email and text message,” said Amy Boggs, a Florida property insurance attorney at Boggs Law Group. “The only difference is they are in fact performing a service.”

And in some cases, the work is not always completed as agreed upon, customers have alleged. A class action complaint filed in July accused Lickety Split of failing to complete work that was paid for in full. The lead plaintiff for the class alleged they paid Lickety Split $28,676 for a duct replacement project, but the company used lower quality materials than was agreed upon and did not finish other contracted work.

Despite its shaky record with consumers and notoriety among lawyers, its state licenses, displayed clearly on its website, bolster Lickety Split’s outward appearance. Similarly, Florida Roof Specialists, and its related company Minorcan Construction Group, lists its state licenses prominently at the top of its documents, according to contracts reviewed by the Florida Trib.

Jeremy S. Rogero, the owner of Florida Roof Specialists, first obtained a contracting license with the state in 2006, then another in 2014. But in 2022, two years after the Florida Attorney General’s office began receiving complaints about the company’s deceptive practices, he applied for and received three new contractor licenses.

This year, months into the attorney general’s lawsuit, DBPR is set to renew its licenses again through 2028, according to the license information on their website.

Door-to-door sales

May Kurimai, 86, a Pinellas County resident, said she first heard the name Florida Roof Specialists in September 2023, when a door-to-door salesman approached her in her driveway as she unloaded groceries. She said the man said he could see damage on her roof from recent storms. Though Kurimai wasn’t aware of any, she hired the company after they promised she would only pay her insurance deductible.

“There was nothing else in writing that [said] like, here’s the estimate of the bill,” May Kurimai said. “He just said I would pay the deductible of $2,500, and they would accept whatever the insurance offered.”

Florida Roof Specialists began the work on her roof in January 2024. As the contractors worked, May Kurimai and her daughter Jennifer Kurimai, 56, said they started to develop concerns. They said some of the workers spilled paint and tar on the front of the house and punched holes in the copper tubing on the roof.

“It was like a $6,000 fee if you cancel,” Jennifer Kurimai said. “But by the time anyone knew that there was a contract, it was past that [3 day] deadline.”

In the following months, the Kurimai’s watched their insurance company dispute charges for work the women said they didn’t approve and, in some cases, never happened. Emails between the Kurimai’s, their insurance company, and Florida Roof Specialists reviewed by The Florida Trib showed disputed charges for new gutters the women said were working fine, and an OSHA supervisor they said was never there.

In January 2025, May Kurimai got a letter– she was being sued for $21,000 and a lien had been placed on her home.

“[Customers] sign a contract, and there’s another piece of paper that will say this is what you’ll owe out of pocket, and it’ll just say their deductible on there,” Annie Rodriguez, the legal aid attorney, said. “It never says anything else, so they don’t find out about these extra charges until months after the job is done.”

The Kurimais’ allegations track with the pattern the Attorney General’s attorneys found.

“The Roofing Companies, [Florida Roof Specialists and Minorcan Construction], as part of their general business model, continue to file baseless liens against the properties of consumers who refuse to pay additional amounts in excess of the… insurance deductible as agreed, and initiate foreclosure actions on their properties,” state lawyers wrote in their lawsuit. “In almost every case, a good faith estimate was not provided to consumers.”

The attorney general’s office based its lawsuit on nearly 200 complaints from defrauded consumers.

In July, a Florida Trib reporter met the lawyers representing Florida Roof Specialists at a hearing in the downtown Jacksonville courthouse and sent a follow-up email with questions for the company, which they said they’d pass on to their client. Florida Roof Specialists never followed up despite multiple check-ins with their attorney, who confirmed they had received the Trib’s questions.

In response to the attorney general’s allegations, Florida Roof Specialists’ attorneys responded in court documents that they, “deny the allegation that [they] participated in any unlawful “scheme” and… deny that [they] had a general practice of making false or misleading damage representations.”

Days before publication, after a Trib reporter’s repeated efforts to contact Florida Roof Specialists for questions, including about Kurimai’s allegations, Jennifer Kurimai shared an email with The Florida Trib sent from Florida Roof Specialists. The email said that her mother’s invoice was completely paid, and in a follow up email the sender said the lien would be removed from her house.

On August 17, Florida Roof Specialists filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit against her and remove the lien.

Hazy contracts

Prior to 2023, homeowners could assign their insurance policy rights to hired contractors to negotiate on their behalf. The contractor could then file claims and collect payments directly from the insurance company, allowing them to begin urgent work before financing had been finalized.

Amy Boggs, the property insurance attorney, said the assignment of benefits law was repealed because it was being abused. She said construction and insurance companies often ended up in litigation disputing charges, leaving consumers stuck with bills and lawsuits they never bargained for.

“What would happen in those cases is the poor homeowner wouldn’t even know the lawsuit is really in their name,” Boggs said.

Though a 2022 law made assignment of benefits illegal, lawyers said some contracting companies, like Florida Roof Specialists, are still doing it anyway by directing the consumer to negotiate with their insurer on the contractors’ behalf.

“The main problem is that the contracts that they’re having people sign have no prices on it,” Rodriguez, the legal aid lawyer, said. “A lot of roofers, [Florida Roof Specialists] included, have created this kind of way of doing business that’s like an assignment of benefits, but they’re not calling that, and they’re not following the statute.”

Lawyers familiar with the company said Lickety Split doesn’t use the same “assignment of benefit”-style agreements. They said Lickety Split instead will lock consumers into loans rather than going after their insurance company.

Lawyers who work with cheated Floridians said they are often asked to sign documents on a tablet without anyone showing them what they were signing.

“Where you’ve got a homeowner or somebody signing something on an iPad without being able to see it, that’s obviously a real problem,” Boggs said. “At the very least, there has to be something hardmailed or emailed to the client of a full copy of what they signed at the outset. So [they’re] all in agreement. So there can’t be a later bait and switch.”

Rodriguez said that she has seen allegations that Lickety Split has had customers sign waivers that prevent them from disputing credit card transactions for discrepancies or overcharges, which violates the federal Truth in Lending Act that protects fair credit billing.

In the class action lawsuit filed against Lickety Split on July 16, the lead plaintiff alleged they signed one of these improper waivers. The lawyer wrote in the complaint that the class sought a ruling that Lickety Split’s “pre-printed waiver provisions are void and unenforceable.”

“Consider the possibility that a contractor accidentally overcharges a customer’s credit card or charges a customer’s credit card for work that was never done. This [waiver], if enforceable, would leave them no recourse,” Rodriguez said. “That attempt to override and preempt controlling federal law is unconscionable.”

Strong-arm tactics

Tammie Reid, 56, a Jacksonville resident, said she looked into hiring Lickety Split to help finish a bathroom renovation on the house she lives in. Because the house was under her mother’s name, she said the salesman insisted that they needed to speak with her too. Reid agreed to do a three-way call, but said she was dropped from it right as the salesman began talking about the concerning findings of a water test.

“[The salesman] said the minerals in the water were 30 times the level it should be and it was making us ill,” Reid said. “They had [my mom] scared and worried.”

By the time Reid got her mother back on the phone, she had already agreed to hire the company. She said a salesman drove to her mother’s house right after the call and had her sign documents on an ipad.

Without knowing it, Reid said her mother had signed on to a $45,000 loan she had no way to pay back, and she spent the following year fighting the company and leaving bad reviews. Eventually, she said, Lickety Split offered her $5,000 to stop talking about them.

Lawyers said the company will often go on the offense against bad press and are known to offer money to former customers in exchange for removing their bad reviews. The highest concentration of their bad reviews are on a Facebook group called “Victims of Lickety Split Revived.” The page has more than 3,000 members, and new posts go up weekly documenting unverified allegations about the company’s business practices.

In June, Lickety Split sued two people who it believes moderate the group for defamation, claiming the moderators posted and encouraged others to post false allegations of the company’s misconduct and infringed on their trademark by using the company’s logo and mascot in posts.

In the filed complaint, the Lickety Split denied allegations of fraud, criminal conduct, unlawful business practices, customer exploitation, and intentional equipment sabotage.

“We here at Lickety Split take consumer concerns very seriously. Upon receiving this inquiry, we immediately reached out to the consumer. After a short back and forth, we now believe that this issue has been resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused,” the company wrote in multiple responses to customer complaints on the Better Business Bureau website, another venue in which customers have voiced concerns about the company.

The Florida Trib attempted to reach a representative from Lickety Split for four weeks, including calling all of the listed phone numbers for the company. Someone who answered one of those calls said they would pass on a reporter’s questions to human resources.

Direct messages to the owner of the company, Thomas Noland, on his personal phone number, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts went unanswered. An attorney representing Lickety Split in a federal employment case also did not respond to an email.

The Florida attorney general’s office has accused Florida Roof Specialists of using similar heavy-handed tactics.

“[Flordia Roof Specialists] threatened many consumers who refused to succumb to the Roofing Companies’ attempts to extort additional funds by placing liens on their residential properties if they failed to pay,” the attorney general’s office wrote in its amended complaint. The company had placed liens on 73 homes at the time the AG lawsuit was initiated.

Customers said they felt the company was trying to intimidate them into paying the inflated prices they were charged.

“The question is do you really want to risk losing your property and potential financial ruin over 21,637.27?” a lawyer representing Florida Roof Specialists wrote in a letter to May Kurimai, which The Florida Trib reviewed.

All of the former customers interviewed by The Florida Trib said they intend to fight the legal action against them and challenge the agreements they were trapped into.

“It’s way too easy,” Bennet-Harvey said. “After hurricanes, everybody shows up to help, supposedly help us, and they reap the rewards of people’s pain and suffering.”

Avoiding New Scam Tactics

Never sign a salesperson’s blank iPad or tablet.

If a contractor wants you to sign documents on a tablet, make sure you are signing on an actual contract document and not a blank screen. Ask for a hard copy of the contract and read it all the way through. Ask the sales representative to show you their cancellation policy in the contract. Make sure estimates are itemized and listed clearly.

Display a no-solicitation sign.

Starting July 1, a new Florida law made it illegal for door-to-door salespeople to solicit at private homes that display a compliant “No Commercial Solicitation” sign. Individuals who violate the law face a $500 fine for a first violation and second-degree misdemeanor charges for subsequent violations.

To be protected under the law, the sign must be at least 8.5 by 11 inches, clearly visible, contain specific language and cite the relevant Florida Statute (Section 501.062).

Check for reviews and violations from multiple sources.

Contractors may remove reviews from their website or settle individuals’ grievances in exchange for taking down negative feedback. The Better Business Bureau discloses that they do not guarantee their information is accurate. DBPR’s website shows only one closed complaint under one of Lickety Split’s licenses despite multiple consumers reporting they filed complaints with the department.

Check as many reviews and forums as you can. Check for Facebook groups and reddit threads dedicated to the contractor you are thinking about hiring. Check Google, Yelp and ask your neighbors. Take your time to make a decision.

Read a contractor’s privacy policy before you sign a contract

Contracting companies may collect and distribute personal data you do not consent to. Check a company’s website and read their privacy policy before you sign anything. Ask questions about the policy and state you do not consent to any personal information being collected in an email so it is timestamped.

Be skeptical of salespeople who claim to be part of your community

Salespeople attempting to build credibility with a potential customer may pretend to be part of their community. Lawyers familiar with construction industry scams said salespeople will often research local churches and name drop members of the congregation or appeal to shared religious beliefs to appear trustworthy.

Don’t trust a contractor just because they have a license.

Hiring a licensed contractor gives you the ability to report their misconduct to the Department of Business and Professional Regulation, but it doesn’t require the department to investigate or address your complaints.

Rhiannon is currently a journalism master’s student at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and a summer 2026 fellow with The Florida Trib. The Tributary is a nonprofit newsroom producing high-impact government accountability and investigative journalism in the public interest. Based in Jacksonville, the Florida Trib's mission is to shine a light on systemic problems and solutions, hold those in power accountable, and focus on under covered topics through collaboration with other news organizations and the community.