Fake builder Ha Thi Miki Nguyen fined $170,000, convicted twice
Three homeowners in Melbourne's east went looking for a builder and found her on Facebook, where she advertised as Tim Reno and as AZ Homes. She was not a registered builder. She pleaded guilty to 12 charges under the Building Act, was convicted on every one of them, and was fined $170,000. It was the second time a court had convicted her of offending of this kind.
01What the court found
A guilty plea to 12 charges, a conviction on every one of them, and a fine the regulator describes as a record.
This is not the only conviction of its kind we have covered. In a separate matter, an Officer man trading as a building company was convicted and fined $70,000 over an unregistered renovation at a Belgrave home, after reaching the homeowner through a Facebook post and asking for a deposit ten times the legal maximum. Two different people, two convictions, and the same method. Both were avoidable at the very first step, and that step is free: here is how to check a builder is registered, in every state and territory.
Ha Thi Nguyen, known as Miki, 48, of Malvern East, pleaded guilty to 12 charges under the Building Act at the Moorabbin Magistrates' Court. Magistrate Jennifer Tregent convicted her on all of them and fined her $170,000. The Building and Plumbing Commission published the outcome on 12 June 2026 and describes the fine as a record.
The Commission's published account sets out what the 12 charges covered. Each one goes to something a homeowner reasonably takes for granted when they hand over money.
The plea was entered to all 12 charges and the convictions were recorded on all 12. Nothing here is an allegation. It is a decided matter, admitted by the person charged.
02She had already been convicted in 2022
This is the fact that decides how the rest of it reads. A court had dealt with her once already.
In April 2022, at the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court, Nguyen was convicted and fined for similar offences. The magistrate in that proceeding described her in three words that the Commission repeated when it published this year’s outcome.
"dishonest cunning thief"
A conviction is the clearest instruction the system has. It had already been given once. Three more households then paid money to somebody a court had already convicted of offending of this kind, and none of them had any way of knowing that. Which is the part worth sitting with: a register does not tell you what somebody has done in the past. It tells you whether they hold registration now, and that is the question that decides everything else.
03How she reached the homeowners
All three found her the same way, and the story she told each of them was the same story.
All three homeowners made contact through Facebook, where she advertised under the names Tim Reno and AZ Homes. The properties were at Wantirna South, Doncaster and Donvale.
The Commission records what she told them. That she was a registered builder. That she and her husband owned a construction company employing 40 people. That she had more than 20 years' experience in the trade.
We have been deliberate about that second column. The registration representation is the one the record settles, because she admitted it and was convicted of it. The other two are recorded as things she said, and the Commission's account does not take them further. Where the record stops, so do we, however tempting the pattern looks.
It is worth saying plainly that none of this needed carelessness on anybody's part. The advertising looked like advertising. The story was coherent and it was consistent. Very little in the ordinary business of arranging building work teaches a person to ask for a registration number and then go and check it against a public register, and the whole method depends on that gap.
04Why the aliases are the whole method
Four names, one person. A register search only works if you are searching the right name.
The record in this matter carries four names for one person, and each of them did different work.
A trading name on a social media page tells you what somebody has decided to call their business. It does not tell you whether anybody holds registration, and the two are easy to confuse precisely because good advertising is designed to make them look like the same thing. The Commission's register is where that question gets answered, and it is answered against a name.
What to do with a name you have been given
Our practical read, and it costs nothing to follow. Ask for the full legal name of the person or company that will hold the contract, and the registration number, in writing, before any money moves. Search the Commission's register for that name, then check that the registration number on the result is the number you were given, and that the name on the result matches the name on the quote, the contract and the bank details. Where those do not line up, that is the moment to stop, and it is a great deal cheaper than stopping after the deposit.
05How to check a builder is registered before you pay
The regulator publishes the register. It is free, it is public, and it is the check this whole case turns on.
The Commission's own consumer guidance is that jobs over $10,000 should be carried out by a registered builder, and that the mandatory building insurance should be in place. That is the regulator's guidance rather than ours, and it is the shortest available statement of what this case was about.
Registration is a floor, not a guarantee. It tells you that somebody holds registration, and that their regulatory history sits on the public record. It does not tell you that the work will be right, which is a separate question with a separate answer: what a registered builder facing suspension looks like is a different problem from this one, and the same register is where both of them surface.
If you are buying a home that somebody else had built, the registration question is historic and the condition of the work is the live one. That is what an independent pre-purchase inspection is for.
06What to do if you have already paid someone like this
Not legal advice, and we are careful about that line. What we can tell you is what an inspection establishes, and why it is the document the rest of it runs on.
If money has already changed hands and the person has stopped answering, the useful thing to understand early is that the position is documentable even when the builder is gone. That is true whether the builder was never registered at all or was registered and has since collapsed, and your options when a builder disappears turn very heavily on what can be shown about the state of the work.
What we tend to find on work left behind by somebody who was not registered is rarely the thing the owner rang about. The call is about a cracked tile or a door that will not close. What an inspection records is the sequence underneath it: the waterproofing, the flashings, the framing, whether the wet areas were built in the right order, and whether what is there matches the plans that were approved. Those are the items that stop being visible the moment the linings go on, and they are the ones that cost real money to put right later.
None of that is a statement about the three properties in this matter. We did not inspect them, and the record does not describe the condition of the work.
Where a build is still running, the answer is not one inspection at the end of it. Work that is inspected at each construction stage gets looked at while the frame, the membranes and the wet areas are still open, which is the only time some of it can be seen at all.
07Sources
Every fact stated in this article is drawn from one of the documents below.
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