Homeowner’s crusade results in fraud charges
After handyman allegedly took cash and vanished, Burlington man fought back
Fraudsters are infamous for taking people’s money, spending it and leaving a slew of victims in their wake. Steven Morrison wasn’t prepared to be a victim.
In the spring, a handyman who had advertised on Kijiji visited Morrison to talk about building a backyard deck. Morrison said he was immediately confronted with a request for a $2,500 deposit so the carpenters could get to work.
Morrison paid $500, withholding the other $2,000 until post holes were dug the following day. He says that was the last time he saw the Vaughan handyman at his home.
After calling the man’s cellphone over and over again, Morrison says he’d get responses like: “What are you going to do about it?” “Sue me” and “Have a nice day.”
“I might have just let it go, but he was taunting me,” the subcontractor from Burlington said. “I’m Scottish — we never let anything go.”
Police told him that because work had technically been done on his backyard project, the homeowner’s complaint was a “civil matter.”
Morrison’s next move was to call the man a scam artist in posts on Kijiji, to which a number of other victims — in Mississauga, Toronto and Markham — responded.
Eventually, Kijiji barred Morrison, suggesting he was a rival contractor trying to smear the man’s name. So, he turned to posting details on consumer websites and began a calling campaign against the man, ringing his “countless” phones and businesses names over and again.
After he found out where the man lived, Morrison even knocked on his door, snapping a photo of the man while the two argued on what Morrison called the man’s rented “million-dollar” Concord property.
After weeks of the campaign, the handyman eventually called Morrison, saying he’d pay back the money, noting that he was “costing” him “a fortune.” But the money never came. Morrison eventually gathered five of the handyman’s alleged victims and they went to Halton police as a group. They were told to make police reports in their own jurisdictions; then, Toronto police acted, charging Eugene Ostrovski, 29, with fraud under $5,000, forgery and uttering forged documents.