‘Heartless!’ Message from elderly Shropshire fraud victim about £59,000 builder scam who left house ‘a complete mess’

Michael Jim McDonald, 24, was last week ordered to pay a “ridiculous” £500 in compensation to Carol and Roy Pitchford after he and his family cheated their way into their lives and emptied their bank account within a month .

McDonald, along with his sister Tilly and father, Michael Senior, enticed the vulnerable Pitchfords to have more and more work done on their Aston Drive home, Newportwith Tilly giving Carol a rose and an ice cream on her birthday, before taking her to the bank to transfer thousands of pounds at a time.

McDonald Junior was the only one of the trio to be prosecuted, but 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 crumbling walls, leaking roofs and “wobbly” paving stones after shoddily completing an extension, a patio and a summer house.

All told, a reputable builder would probably have done the work for less than £15,000. The Pitchfords, who had to pay a further £40,000 to a real construction company 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 hearing impaired, have lived in Aston Drive for more than 40 years.

Carol told the Shropshire Star: “It has been a concern for five years and I am only getting £500 back out of almost £60,000. That is, if he can be bothered to pay for it.

“I want everyone to know about it. I wanted to go to court to see what happened, but I can’t walk very well.”

Recalling the fateful moment she first saw McDonalds on January 22, 2018, Carol said: “They came to the door. There were three. Two big men.

“They did the tree and then they started saying they needed to put a wall in the front. I said, ‘there’s nothing wrong with it.’ Then they got pretty dirty.”

Unfortunately, the Pitchfords didn’t heed that early warning, and McDonald’s high-pressure tactics – including scaring them about defects in their home, insisting that work needed to be done right away, lying about building permits and offering dodgy discounts – were met with forced the victims to allow them to move on.