You didn't do even a rudimentary background check? Sorry, but you messed up. Live and learn. First, don't pay in advance. Next, get references. Next, pay a few bucks for a background check, if it's not a well known company. Very sorry you lost a bunch of money, but I cannot have a lot of sympathy. People get scammed too easily. The whole deal just seems foreign to the usual ways of doing business. Don't take it as personal criticism, but use it moving forward as a learning experience. Don't trust people. Verify everything.
As I said, this is the first time I've EVER hired anyone to do any kind of contract work. We just bought our first home over the summer, and that was a new process to me as well. Everything he said sounded legit, and I had my mind on the end result... which was my ultimate downfall. They don't exactly teach you these kinds of things in school. I've never been scammed and I surely would've questioned his motives if I saw any red flags. I'm not asking for sympathy, just wanted to post this so other people don't make the same mistake I did.
In hindsight, I'm not even 100% sure that he intended to rip me off. Some of the work he did wasn't that of someone that had no intentions of finishing the job. If I took a contract job where I intended to rip someone off, I would do the least amount of work to just barely keep the person on the hook that I would finish the job. When he found a spring and had to clear more trees to move the dam back further into the woods, doesn't sound like something he would do if he didn't plan on finishing it... the trees he cut down weren't worth anything and he actually left them laying down. If he didn't plan on finishing the job, I'm not sure why he'd do all that extra chainsaw work, which is arguably the worst part of the job. I'd just piddle around on my equipment all day if it were me, but who knows. The day he quit working was a day after his warrant was issued, so that may have been part of it. I guess we'll never know.
