Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
- Jay Jordan Dutson, an unlicensed contractor, agreed to repay victims after court proceedings.
- Victims Mark Shea and Kris Phillips lost $15,000 and $11,600, respectively.
- Dutson pleaded guilty to unlawful contracting and aims to avoid jail by restitution.
WEST JORDAN — Imagine paying thousands of dollars to a contractor only to have him do the job wrong or take your money and vanish. It happens more often than you might think in Utah.
KSL's Get Gephardt team has been focusing on the issue in the series, "Cited but not shut down." A man our team reported on more than a year ago is now agreeing to pay his victims back.
Tuesday was Jay Jordan Dutson's day in court. It's a day that, for his victims, was a long time coming.
Get Gephardt reported on Mark Shea back in February of 2024 after Dutson walked off the job redoing the back deck of Shea's Sugarhouse home.
"He walked away with at least $15,000," Shea said.
It was a similar story for Kris Phillips, only the roughly $11,600 Phillips paid for a deck on his Holladay home was never even started.
"Nothing. Absolutely nothing. He took the money," Phillips said.
In that 2024 investigation, Get Gephardt found Dutson took the money knowing he should not have been doing the work. He'd been cited by the state for contracting without a license multiple times.
Shea said he specifically asked Dutson if he was licensed before hiring him, and he was assured, yes. He only found out he didn't have a license after contacting state regulators.
Despite all of this, last year, Get Gephardt found Dutson was still advertising his business online with the Yelp posting stated that he is a "licensed individual."
Last year by phone, Dutson told Get Gephardt that when he says he's licensed, that refers to him having a business license, not a contractor's license.
Asked why he's been doing deck work knowing he's not supposed to without a license, he stated he was "working on getting it." As for whether or not the people from whom he took money will be getting a refund, he said he is "trying to do everything I can."
Now, more than a year later, he has made that same commitment to a judge.
"It's a life lesson to me on this entire thing," he said Tuesday during a hearing trying to determine restitution.
Dutson pleaded guilty earlier this year to unlawful contracting. To avoid jail, prosecutors expect he will agree to make payments back to his victims. One of his victims, Kris Phillips, was in the courtroom.
"I feel good justice is being served," Phillips said. "We were able to bring it this far with help from people like you and other people and to put an end to what I would call a small criminal enterprise."
As we have reported many times, complaints against contractors are a big issue in Utah. In fact, state licensing investigators said that about one out of every five fraud complaints that the Utah Attorney General gets is about a contractor.
Contractors are legally required to be licensed and to do the work for which they are paid but, when they don't, state regulators can do little more than cite the contractor and refer the issue to prosecutors. As Dutson's victims can attest, it can take years for consumers to be made whole if they are made whole at all.
