Jessica Reader is about to enjoy her first weekend in a long time. She’s heading out with her sister and aunt to toast the end of three years of hell which pushed her to thoughts of suicide. It was in January 2022 that the veterinary surgeon from Wenvoe, Vale of Glamorgan, had stumbled across an ad in the Glamorgan Star newspaper for a builder named Michael Anderson. He’d been in the business for more than 50 years and Jessica decided he seemed the right person to build her an eco home on the land her parents own near Wenvoe Golf Club. “He seemed so nice, genuinely,” Jessica tells WalesOnline from the sitting room of her parents’ home, without which she says she’d effectively now be homeless. “He was like a grandfather-type figure. Very warm and had an answer for everything. He also came across as having a fantastic knowledge of planning matters, which I didn’t, so I decided he was the perfect person to build my home.” Within months she realised Anderson, 76, was not all he made himself out to be. “He’d told me I wouldn’t need planning permission when it turned out I actually did. That’s when I first started to worry.” Jessica had told Anderson she had a budget of £70,000 but within weeks he had talked her into stumping up £131,000 which she paid in full. What Anderson put together was a shell of a building with a sagging roof where water was collecting in the centre. It remained that way for months and as the time passed she began to suspect Anderson had no intention of completing the project she’d paid him to do. By the summer of 2023 Jessica finally obtained planning permission for her home but by the October she had a breakdown after repeated no-shows from Anderson. “He had this charming way about him. He was an expert in kicking things down the road again and again. He told me four times he had Covid, then it was the weather , then he couldn’t get the labour. But towards the end he just stopped answering my calls and I realised that was it. He’d taken off with my money and wasn’t going to build my home. “I broke down. I still remember the date and the time vividly in my head. It was a feeling of sheer helplessness. I had trusted him and yet he had taken everything I had saved including inheritance money. Why did I pay this person all that money? Well I’m not involved in that world and there was no way I expected to be scammed by him.” The impact on Jessica’s life was profound. She dropped out of training to specialise in a different field at work, she quit working on complex operations because she felt she couldn’t concentrate hard enough, and in her darkest moments she wished she wasn’t alive. “I hoped at the time my emotional breakdown might be fatal. It was only my sense of such rage which got me through this and motivated me to carry on. I have suffered from rage like I have never felt throughout this whole episode in my life. It was that which made me committed to getting justice for what he did.” Still helpless, Jessica was contacted by Andrew and Denise Fitzgerald. “The feeling was relief when I realised I wasn’t alone,” Jessica recalls. “It was overwhelming. I felt like I could finally see a way through this.” Having also been scammed by Anderson the couple were trying to assemble a group of people to take him to court through trading standards. They’d got wind locally that Jessica had also been targeted. “I became quite skilled at getting information,” Andrew says from his home at Porthcawl seafront which has now almost been completed four years after they had tasked Anderson with building it. “Let’s say Anderson’s builders were not discreet. I’d heard of a property in Wenvoe which Anderson was working on and I found out it was Jessica through the Vale’s planning portal online. It became easy enough to find out who might have been targeted in the same way we were.” Andrew and Denise had moved to Porthcawl with the dream of spending their retirement beside the sea and living closer to family in the Vale of Glamorgan. They had paid Anderson to demolish an existing bungalow and build a brand new home on the same footprint. “We chose him because he had told us he would easily be able to get planning permission for us,” Denise explains. “He gave us a quote of £219,500 excluding VAT in 2019." Payments were to be in three lump sums. His first invoice came within a week for £83,000 including £13,833 VAT. Besides new build homes being VAT-exempt the reality was Anderson was not registered to charge VAT anyway. The invoices didn't stop there. By March 2020 he had increased the price of the work by £30,000 even though very little work had been completed. By November 2021 the couple had an independent surveyor inspect the property they’d bought. They said no more than 40% of the work Anderson had committed to had been completed and there was “significant water ingress”. A number of mistakes in Anderson’s work were revealed too including a sagging and rotten roof which threatened to cave in within a year. Worse was still to come when in February 2022 the couple realised Anderson had not been paying the contractors. At the same time Andrew and Denise were receiving emails and calls from contractors including electricians and window suppliers demanding payment which the couple had already paid. The bill for the window supplier was £25,000. Denise recalls: “We were going to Anderson saying: ‘Why isn’t the window man coming back?’ And Anderson would say: ‘He’s a ba*****. He’s had his money and he’s not coming back.’ Well of course now we know the window man wasn’t coming back because Anderson wasn’t passing on the money. He was telling us we can get a discount and a warranty if we pay everything through him but he was pocketing it.” According to court documents the couple lost £43,018 to Anderson in terms of fraud but they believe in reality it is higher. When taking into account the cost of completing the rest of the building plus remedial work their outlay was significantly more. To add insult to injury while the court case was in progress the badly-laid pitched roof that Anderson had been promising to rectify started leaking and with slate tiles slipping off. Chartered surveyors and building control documented that it needed to be fully stripped back and replaced. Anderson refused to pay the £21,000 it would cost so the couple had to take more money from their pension to cover the work. During their own investigations Andrew and Denise had also noticed Andrea Phillips and Richard Booth’s home around the corner in Porthcawl, also being worked on by Anderson, had seen little progress. Anderson had left the house in disrepair and unfinished. It took 16 months of remedial work carried out by a separate builder to complete the project. It left them in debt and maxed out on credit cards. The couples’ stories are almost identical. Richard and Andrea had worked “very hard” to be mortgage-free by 2019 when they had also decided to buy their dream home in Porthcawl. It was when Andrea received a phone call from the kitchen company demanding payment which the couple knew they’d already paid that they decided to cut ties with Anderson. They had to take out a loan to pay for the kitchen again. “I rang him and asked where the money was as he’d obviously not paid the company,” Andrea explains. “And he said to me: ‘I don’t have the money.’ So where did the money go?” It transpired a number of contractors were owed a total of £39,300 – all money Andrea and Richard had already given to Anderson. Richard says: “At the start he put it up from £115,000 for £130,000 and we went with that and said it was fine. I realised it was a scam by about the sixth payment. By that point he’d had all that money off us though. We’d already paid him £130,000.” “Honestly at the start I felt sorry for him,” Andrea remembers. “He always used to come here and turn the tears on like a tap. He’d come in and all of a sudden he’d start crying and talking to me about all his life troubles. Other victims of his have told me he was exactly the same with them. He tried to play on people’s emotions and trust without a doubt. Especially women. “He got his foot in the door with me and he played me. He saw me as an easy target. Richard would say: ‘We’re not paying him any more money.’ And I’d say we have to. He hated it whenever Richard turned up.” Richard recalls: “I wanted to talk about the project and he wanted to talk about his life." The group teamed up to help trading standards at Bridgend county borough council put a case together to get Anderson to court. It’s understood there could be multiple other victims of Anderson. Don’t miss a court report by signing up to our crime newsletter here . He appeared at Cardiff Crown Court on Monday charged with four counts of fraud and one count of dishonesty by false representation. His wife Sandie Anderson, 66, was also charged with possession of criminal property for a bank account she owned holding £35,000 her husband had obtained fraudulently from duped customers. The court heard Anderson had obtained at least £263,000 from customers he’d ripped off but cannot afford to pay back what he owes his victims in full. Judge Eugene Egan handed Anderson a jail sentence of three years and six months, at least half of which he’ll serve in custody. Sandie Anderson was jailed for 18 weeks suspended for 12 months. She must also wear an electronic tag preventing her from leaving home between 7pm and 6am. When sentencing Judge Egan submitted that the defendants left a "trail of misery" through their actions causing "decent and hardworking people emotional and financial distress". Despite being told in mitigation that Sandie Anderson had limited involvement and was essentially controlled by her husband Judge Egan said she was fully aware of what was going on and facilitated her husband’s criminality. Jessica has since paid a separate builder to construct her eco home. In all the eco home has ended up costing her £200,000 – coming in at £130,000 more than she had budgeted for. While she lost £131,000 directly to Anderson she believes that taking into account things like the cost of remedial work his actions have left her £200,000 out of pocket. “It’s not so much been about how much time he got in prison or about money,” Jessica says. “While it was a lot of money even worse is what this has done to me. It’s broken my trust in others.” Andrew and Denise are having to remortgage their home to pay back their debts. “We had the money behind us to retire with a good pot,” Denise says. “But those savings have gone on all this and that pot is empty now. We’ve got bills to pay and a car that needs replacing. We no longer have money behind us and that’s not a position we’ve ever been in. It's awful.” Andrea and Richard's house is up for sale. The couple say they can no longer live in the area as a result of the case. Richard adds: “You lose faith in humanity when something like this happens to you. He used to come and give a pound each to our grandkids – a pound of the money he was nicking off us. By the time I found him out he said to me: ‘You won’t get near me.’ I told him: ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ And we haven’t. I don’t know how he’s got away with it for so long. It’s caught up with him.” For confidential support the Samaritans can be contacted for free around the clock 365 days a year on 116 123.