Spring is here and with the warm weather, the blooming flowers and the kids playing outdoors, your thoughts may be turning to your home improvement project list. If you plan on hiring a contractor, do your homework and weed out potentially fraudulent contractors - or risk the consequences.

For some it's too late. In Athens, Tennessee, detectives are seeking a contractor who defrauded a 90-year-old woman who had work done on her roof, reports The Daily Post-Athenian. Another contractor had completed the work, but the second "contractor" told her she still owed thousands and forced her to write a second check.

And in Pennsylvania, an 87-year-old woman was charged $22,000 for one day of labor on her $19,000 house, according to an article in The Express Times. She took the contractor's advice and borrowed $30,000 from a now-defunct bank that took a lien on her home. Since then Chase Manhattan Mortgage Corp. bought the bank, and the woman -- who has a fixed income of $700 a month -- has not been able to keep up with her payments.

Home improvement contracting topped the list of consumer complaints filed with state and local consumer protection agencies in 2001, according to the eleventh annual consumer complaint survey conducted by the National Association of Consumer Agency Administrators and the Consumer Federation of America.

NACAA is a membership organization of consumer protection agencies at all levels of government. CFA, a non-profit federation of almost 300 pro-consumer organizations, has worked with NACAA on the survey since it was first initiated in 1992.

Home improvement topics not only came in as the most common complaint to consumer agencies, but were also named as the fastest growing complaint category ¾ and the type of industry in which a company is most likely to go out of business and to reopen under another name.

"While cross-border investigations and Internet fraud are headline grabbers, the majority of consumers find their problems in everyday issues such as building a deck," states Stephen Hannan, an NACAA board member.

It's important you protect yourself, especially during the busy spring home improvement season. The National Association of the Remodeling Industry recommends you use one of its 5,800 members, who are educated and certified.

"There are more than 800,000 businesses and individuals in the U.S. that call themselves home improvement contractors or handymen," NARI said in response to the CFA and NACAA survey. "A large portion of these contractors have limited experience in the professional remodeling field and many move in and out of the industry when work in the construction building trades slows."

Fraudulent contractors will victimize anybody, but many target the elderly.

The American Association of Retired Persons suggests taking these steps: