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A woman in Florida came home from work one day recently and was shocked to discover that her entire driveway had been stolen as part of a scam to steal money from contractors.
“I come home and my driveway is gone,” Amanda Brochu of Apopka told WFTV News.
The bizarre tale began when Brochu put her house for sale in early December.
She says that she had replaced the roof and done other work on the home to try and increase its resale value. That all went fine.
Then one day her son tells her that not one, but five different contractors showed up at her house to measure the driveway.
The weird part? She hadn’t asked any of them to do any work on her driveway.
When she spoke to one of the contractors she was informed that a man named “Andre” had contacted him, requesting that he replace the driveway at Brochu’s house.
Sensing a scam in the making, Brochu contacted police and shared the text messages the contractor had received from “Andre.”
When Orange County Deputies reached out to this mystery man, he claimed “it was a mistake” and that “he just got the address wrong, nothing else will happen again.”
The following week, her driveway was gone.
“I’ve never seen this before. I’ve never had this happen to myself or anyone in our office,” said Brochu’s real estate agent Rocki Sanchez.
Once again, Deputies contacted “Andre” and he said he didn’t have anything to do with her driveway being taken.
So, not only does she no longer have a driveway, she is worried that she either won’t be able to sell her home or at the very least won’t make as much money as she would have.
“No one’s going to buy this,” Brochu said. “This brings down the property now. And that just messes it up for me and my family.”
One contractor quoted her a price of $10,000 to replace the concrete driveway, but since she is already under contract to purchase a nearby property she doesn’t have the funds.
Thankfully, once news of what happened to her got out, a company offered to pay for it.
“I just want to find the person who did this because it’s wrong that they targeted me and my family for this,” said Brochu.
The entire story (which is dissected nicely over on Reddit) is almost as strange as one that happened back in 2021 when a 58-foot-long bridge mysteriously vanished in Ohio.