IT’S PAVE BACK TIME
Conman took advance payments from customers for jobs he didn’t even start
A ROGUE tradesman who conned customers out of thousands has been ordered to pay back all of the cash.
Paving company boss James Henderson was slammed by victims after admitting defrauding them out of more than £20,000 by taking deposits for work he never intended to carry out.
The 58-year-old scammed one client out of more than £9000. Now he has been ordered to pay them £20,100 after appearing for sentence at Kirkcaldy Sheriff Court.
Lorraine Brown, 60, who handed Henderson £4000, previously told the Record: “He was so plausible. We eventually got our money back from the bank.
“We were very lucky but others may not have been so lucky.”
Fife Council’s trading standards team carried out an investigation into Henderson and submitted a report to the Procurator Fiscal.
He had been due to face trial last month but admitted a string of charges instead. The conman, from Kingskettle, Fife, also admitted scamming one Buckhaven victim out of £9100 for landscaping a driveway and garden work. He admitted taking £3000 from an elderly female customer in Dundee meant for a new patio and brickwork cleaning and another £4000 from a client for a patio refurbishment in Limekilns. Prosecutors said he took the cash between July 2021 and September 2022 and “had no intention of carrying out said work”. Henderson had posted a picture of an expensive Range Rover with a private number plate on social media when he was deceiving clients in September 2022, while negative online reviews of his business were stacking up.
One person said: “The guy is a class A rogue, a weekend millionaire. But time is catching up with him.”
Henderson was also sentenced to a community payback order which requires him to complete 45 hours of unpaid work.