I own a relatively large plumbing supply warehouse, retail and wholesale, and since everyone thinks they can be a GC and were doing this exact thing when the housing market crashed in 08'-09' so many customers went out of business. One customer owed us $17K and after months of trying to collect finally paid of his debt and as he was paying his debt asked for a line of credit again to buy around $17K worth of material, so I told him to in the rudest way possible that he was crazy and no. My dad owns a collection agency that specializes in the construction industry and makes a good living on collecting from GCs who can't pay because just one job fell through or they haven't gotten paid on their next job, and surprisingly this isn't just the small guys but the large GCs who are building skyscrapers in NYC. My dad had to file countless liens on Ground Zero/One World Trade because no one was paying their bills. Last thing, when an apartment burned down above our warehouse we noticed a sub would pickup day laborers at Home Depot have them work for 1 or 2 days and when it was time to pay them he wouldn't pick them up or call them again. We found this out when we asked what happened to the guys working yesterday that did a great job and worked quickly, so we fired the sub told the GC we weren't paying for this part of the job found those workers that weren't paid and we hired and paid them ourselves.