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Notes -
I am not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice.
It's very difficult to bring serious punishment to a contractor. There are exceptions -- if someone just doesn't do anything, or completely destroys an area, or literally seriously injures or kills someone -- you can sometimes get criminal charges or a contractor's license revoked, but there's a big emphasis on 'sometimes', here. Merely shoddy or below-code work will almost never hit that bar.
Meanwhile, refusing to pay for contracted work that was partially- or incompetently-completed work will almost always result in a construction lien against your property. It's possible to clear this up in court if the work is clearly incomplete or dangerous, but if it's merely incompetent this can be much more complicated and dependent on the whims of a judge, and while active will prevent most loans using or sales of the property.
Mediation is usually the first recourse, if the problem is merely scale rather than scam. If the fault is just doing a bad job for the price, but all the rough parts are kinda in place if you squint, you'll often have no recourse but to badmouth the contractor. Assuming scam...
At least in the United States (and Canada) your main option is court. Below a certain (state-specific) threshold, that will be in small claims court -- good in the sense that it's not very expensive (or slow) to bring suit, bad in the sense that you'll have very limited recourse and if you win will almost always get a (capped) compensatory damages. Having clear contractual obligations (don't just write "follow code": mandate materials and specific tasks) and documenting the full scope of both the damages and before the work can make it easier to win; longer delays before filing suit or having work where it's difficult to find an expert to document problems will be harder (or, worse, if you let a contractor tell you that it 'won't need a permit or inspections' and you believed them). Larger (>5k-10k USD, though again this varies by state) stuff will have to go to conventional civil courts and is almost always going to need lawyers involved to some extent.
Note that just winning in court and demonstrating the damages to the court doesn't necessarily mean you'll get your cash back: a lot of scuzzier contractors are fly-by-night operations that can be extremely difficult to recover damages from, either being conventionally judgement proof by not having a lot of recoverable assets, or by just being too obnoxious to recover them.
The typical advice is prevention. You can't avoid every scammer, but a lot of them have a number of red flags. Most reputable contractors for major projects will have past projects they can point you toward as references, will have enough capital that you can contract most payment to occur after major milestones or project completion, and will not try to skimp on permitting and inspections, because that's how you become a reputable contractor. Most scammy contractors won't put off payment and accept specific contractual requirements that they can't meet, because that's the fastest way for a scammer to not get paid and the contractor's lien to get thrown out. If you get multiple estimates, someone offering an order-of-magnitude lower prices than the average without offering a different scope of work is probably not gonna be able to get the job done.
But those won't help if the contractor just plain lies, or if the inspectors are morons or felons/demented, or if a scammer has hollowed out a once-reputable company or the 'reputable company' was really just a gateway to a roulette of sometimes-reputable subcontractors.
The best prevention has to involve using your own evaluation, whether that be to check yourself or to evaluate specific experts, and to do so throughout the process.
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