'Heartless!' Elderly Shropshire fraud victim's message for £59,000 rip-off builder who left home 'a complete mess'
An elderly couple who were victims of a £59,500 con from a “rip-off” builder have hit out at the “cruel and heartless” scam artist - and criticised the “light” sentence handed down by a judge.
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Michael Jim McDonald, aged 24, was ordered to pay a “derisory” £500 in compensation to Carol and Roy Pitchford last week after he and his family wormed their way into their lives and emptied their bank account within a month.
McDonald, along with his sister Tilly and father, Michael Senior, coaxed the vulnerable Pitchfords to get more and more work done to their home in Aston Drive, Newport, with Tilly giving Carol a rose on her birthday as well as ice cream, before driving her to the bank to transfer thousands of pounds at a time.
McDonald Junior was the only one of the trio prosecuted, however the ways in which his sister and father played their part in the fraud were laid bare in open court.
They left behind a “complete mess”, with walls crumbling, roofs leaking and “wobbly” paving slabs after making a shoddy job of an extension, a patio and a summer house.
All in, a reputable builder would likely have done the work for under £15,000. The Pitchfords, who had to pay out another £40,000 to a proper building firm to put everything right, ended up spending £100,000.
Carol, a 76-year-old who walks with a zimmer frame, and Roy, 83, who is hard of hearing, have lived in Aston Drive for more than 40 years.
Carol told the Shropshire Star: “It has been a worry for five years, and I’m only getting £500 back out of nearly £60,000. That’s if he bothers to pay it.
“I want everybody to know about them. I wanted to go to court to see what happened but I can’t walk very well.”
Recalling the fateful moment she first clapped eyes on the McDonalds on January 22, 2018, Carol said: “They came to the door. There were three of them. Two big men.
“They did the tree and then they started saying a wall at the front needed doing. I said ‘there’s nothing wrong with it’. Then they got quite nasty.”
Unfortunately, the Pitchfords didn’t heed that early warning, and the high-pressure tactics of the McDonalds - including scaring them about defects with their home, insisting work had to be done straight away, lying about planning permission and offering dodgy discounts - coerced the victims into allowing them to carry on.
