March, 2025

I got the chance to speak with Rebecca, David’s daughter, who has been spearheading the justice and recovery efforts for her dad after everything the McDonagh brothers put him through. In addition to telling me the story in their own words, she talked about some of the repairs that could be helpful on David’s house.

The McDonagh brothers didn’t do a whole lot of work on the home, but what they did do was poor quality and even caused some damage. For instance, they tried to fill woodpecker holes on the side of the house and started painting the home without David’s permission. When he asked them to stop, they power washed the paint off, which stripped part of the siding. They also poured a shoddy concrete path/steps on the property that ultimately caused a bad fall for someone later, posing a serious injury risk.  

After talking with Rebecca about the types of repairs she hoped to find for her father’s home, I had one business in mind to call: our 2023 BBB Torch Awards winner,  MacCoy Home Solutions. I knew Aaron MacCoy, the company owner, and his Business Operations Manager, Hayley, for the past couple of years. Not only did they win our local Torch Award for Ethics, but they were also named a finalist for the International Torch Awards for Ethics, served as a judge for subsequent Torch and Spark Awards applicants, and became an Awards sponsor for the 2024 and 2025 programs. Needless to say, they are incredibly committed to their BBB Accreditation and more importantly: giving back to their community.

I first talked with Hayley about David’s situation and our new Restoring Trust program, and she coordinated a site evaluation so the MacCoy team could see the property and develop a scope of work to be done. Hayley, Aaron, their team, and our BBB team member, Jonah, all met David and Rebecca at the house to not only see the site firsthand, but more importantly to meet each other face to face and begin building these important relationships. Rebecca even made a batch of her famous cookies for the crew and one of my favorite pictures from that day is her and Aaron “cheers-ing” each other with the cookies.

Later when I talked with Aaron about the site evaluation and what he and his team found at the property, I was blown away by his excitement, passion, and commitment as a business owner to helping neighbors in need in his community. Aaron said that he had just been talking with his team about the polarized environment we’re all living in now, and we need to look for ways to work together to create good for those around us. The Restoring Trust program provides this opportunity for all of us: consumers who can benefit from fraud prevention and help, businesses that want to assist people and restore a good name for the contracting industry, and BBB Foundation to deliver on our mission of advancing marketplace trust.

Aaron evaluated the home for more than just the siding, painting and concrete. He discovered that David hasn’t been able to do laundry at home for two years because of a plumbing issue, forcing him to travel with laundry back and forth from the laundromat. Aaron committed to setting aside $15,000 from his budget to provide labor and services in-kind to rectify these issues. And that’s not all: Aaron told me that he began to socialize this project with his subcontractors and business contacts and said, “Meghan, this program is resonating. We have buy-in from multiple businesses that want to help.” This buy-in includes a commitment from Aaron’s contact, Accredited Business All Valley Plumbing, to fix the laundry room plumbing issue in-kind, a $3,000 value. Suppliers like Sherwin Williams and Aaron’s lumber yard contact have committed to provide paint and siding materials in-kind as well; and the list keeps growing.

All of this serves as incredible confirmation of why we created this program: we know there’s consumers out there who have experienced significant trauma from fraud and there’s amazing businesses that are ready to give of their time and materials because it’s simply part of their business values. Aaron told me, “I’m so down on this program. Opportunities like this are why I got into business.” It’s because of people like Aaron and his team that we are able to restore trust not just for businesses in the building industry, but for people in general, especially in this tumultuous time.

Do you have your own examples of how businesses are helping people band together and make amazing things happen in our community? I know this is happening every day in more ways than we can count, and I’m always eager to hear these stories and how we can work together to amplify them. Please reach out to me any time: bbbfoundation@thebbb.org

Yours in trust,

Meghan Conradt, Director of Foundation

February, 2025

My name is Meghan Conradt and I'm the Director of Foundation for Better Business Bureau. I couldn't be more excited to share this journey with you as I've worked over the past couple years to rejuvenate and reinvent our BBB Foundation, the charitable entity of Better Business Bureau. When our Board and Executive Team decided to revive our charitable arm and asked me to lead the charge, I came to the table with a background in Marketing, six years of BBB experience, and unbridled enthusiasm for the chance to effect change in our community.

Through this role as a nonprofit leader, I've been privileged to sit at the helm of developing a new program that allows us to provide tangible help to consumers who come to us for assistance. Here's how it started: because I've also lead the BBB Torch and Spark Awards programs for years, I knew there's a wealth of Accredited Businesses in our community that are dedicated to giving back and helping people around them. On the other hand, I also knew BBB receives lots of reports from consumers who are targeted by scams or have poor experiences with businesses - sometimes resulting in money loss or even worse (keep reading). I had a lightbulb moment one day: what if we could find a way to connect these two groups and work to solve some of the issues we're seeing with fraud in our community? Why not help consumers who need to recover find resources and solutions in our Accredited Businesses who are already engaging in outreach work? Thus, the BBB Foundation Restoring Trust program was born with a purpose to help people recover from fraud by connecting with BBB's network of outstanding Accredited Businesses that want to give back.

As I was perusing through Google alerts in my inbox one day in February, I came across an AARP podcast titled “Phony Home Contractors Steal Over $450,000.” I began listening and was immediately horrified at the story that was unfolding. I wish I could say I was shocked, but having worked for Better Business Bureau for over nine years, I sadly know that we hear stories like this one far too often.

One day in late 2023, David, an 80-year-old Navy Veteran and retired Boeing employee, received a knock on his door from two brothers, Patrick and Matthew McDonagh, who claimed to be building contractors working on other property nearby. David lives in his legacy home by himself, which was built by his ex-wife’s parents, where she and David raised their two daughters. The “contractors” offered him a free roof inspection, saying they noticed a hole in the roof and that it looked like it could use repairs. David agreed and after they came down from his roof, they had pictures of damaged shingles and even a damaged shingle to show him. However, neither the shingle they showed him nor the pictures they had were of his roof, which did not need the repairs they claimed.

From there, everything escalated very quickly. The brothers kept identifying other projects around the home that supposedly needed repairs and constantly asked David for more money to support these repairs. They even entered his home and coached him to take money out of his pension and obtain a HELOC loan to continue paying them, which he’s still paying interest on today. Ultimately, the brothers took $430,000 from David while performing very little work on the house, and the work they did do was extremely poor.

Around this time, David’s daughter, Rebecca, caught wind of the amount the contractors had taken from her father and she immediately jumped into action. She stopped payment on the last check to them, alerted the local police, and moved David into her home temporarily. The brothers continued to come by David’s house for days afterwards, trying to get a hold of him (which Rebecca saw via cameras she placed at the home before taking David away). Ultimately, the FBI got involved in the case and the McDonagh brothers were charged in federal court with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and were sentenced to 18 months in prison. David was not the only person they did this to and the brothers had a long trail of victims spanning across the country.

Unfortunately, David is representative of many stories we at BBB often hear from consumers. Contractor fraud is a multi-million dollar issue in the United States every year and home improvement scams were named the fifth riskiest type of scam in the 2024 BBB Scam Tracker Risk Report, with a susceptibility rate of 70% and a median dollar loss of $1,800 per consumer. These are the people that we want to help most and not only restore their homes, but also restore their faith in trustworthy businesses.

When speaking in court, David said “They were aggressive, relentless in their pursuit of more and more money. They preyed on my trust and my faith…. I feel ashamed, frustrated, and betrayed and now I don’t trust others.” This is a sentiment I often hear when working with people who have experienced contractor fraud. Not only do they lose their trust in contractors, but they lose their faith in other humans overall.

I immediately knew that David is a person we want to help through our Restoring Trust program, and I had just the business to call that happened to live near him and was a 2023 BBB Torch Awards winner. It was time to start restoring trust for David and his family.

This story is long and convoluted, like all contractor fraud cases are. I invite you to read more about the details on the U.S. Attorneys website here and see the KOMO News story here.

Yours in trust,

Meghan Conradt, Director of BBB Foundation