Imagine pulling up to a gas station, pumping $20 worth of gas, and after the tank is filled, telling the attendant you'll pay only $10 because that's all you thought it was worth. "Tell it to the judge," the attendant would say as he took your license number and called the police. If this was a construction job, however, the contractor would probably take the $10. Often, the contractor will even believe that there must have been something wrong with the work, otherwise the client would pay the whole amount.

I've spent years studying fraud against builders, and have found that in many cases where contractors are cheated out of all or part of their final payment, their clients are pathological - people who planned from the beginning to get something for nothing. I call them "serial litigators," because they use lawsuits almost compulsively to get...

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