I called the number from the invoice while I was still standing in that unfinished kitchen, and a woman answered on the third ring. I told her my name and asked why my license number and phone number were on an invoice for work I had never done. She went quiet and then asked me what address I was calling about. I gave it to her, and she said she’d never heard of the address, but the invoice in her system had been created under a contractor account that had been using my information since April. I asked her to read me the name attached to the account, and she said it was a company I’d never heard of. Then she said something that made me stop her: the account wasn’t new. It had been active for almost seven years, and someone had been submitting jobs under my license number the entire time.
I drove straight back to the builder’s office and asked to see every document connected to the eighteen-thousand-dollar backcharge. The manager brought out the file, and the first few pages looked normal until I reached the subcontractor agreement. My name was printed correctly, my license number was correct, and even the old phone number I’d used before getting my current one was on the page. But the signature wasn’t mine. It wasn’t even close. I asked where they had gotten the information, and the manager said it had come from the builder’s preferred subcontractor database. Then I asked why my name was listed as the person responsible for the addition when I’d never bid on it. He said he’d assumed I’d taken the job directly through another crew. I told him I didn’t have another crew. That’s when he turned the next page over and showed me the payment history. There had been four previous payments made under my name, all for jobs in towns I’d never worked in, and every payment had gone to the same bank account.
I took copies of everything and called my bank before I went home. The account number wasn’t mine, but the routing information belonged to a local bank I’d used years ago when my business was starting out. I called them, gave them my old business name, and asked whether any account had ever been opened using my license information. The woman said she couldn’t tell me much over the phone, but she could confirm one thing: there was an account that had been opened in my name, closed two years later, and then reopened under a slightly different business name. I asked who had signed the original paperwork, and she told me there was a scanned copy of the identification attached to the file. I asked if she could tell whether it was my license. She said yes, and then she said the photograph wasn’t mine. But the license number was. And when I asked her what name was printed underneath the photograph, she read it to me — and it was the name of the person who had…
