Melbourne residents are sounding the alarm over a tradie they claim is a serial scammer who has racked up a trail of devastated customers now tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket.
News.com.au previously reported that Tomislav ‘Tom’ Jankovic, the eponymous director of Big Tom Construction, has a retired couple chasing him over a $15,000 refund after failing to build their deck and pergola as agreed.
Since then, three more furious clients have come forward.
One of them, Gemma*, is another retiree subsisting off the pension and she was left with a partially completed deck to show for her $10,200 deposit which she paid to Mr Jankovic a year ago.
As a result, the 71-year-old woman has to step across the joists of the deck whenever she enters or exits her home, as she cannot afford to engage a new tradesman to finish the job.
“It’s a dangerous mess he has left me in,” she lamented to news.com.au.
Gemma had a mediation scheduled with the builder earlier this month, organised through the Domestic Building Dispute Resolution Victoria, although Mr Jankovic did not attend.
Mr Jankovic was called, texted and emailed for comment. Previously, he declined to comment to news.com.au, citing legal reasons.
Another Big Tom Construction customer, Trent Thomason, is also furious after paying $31,500 to renovate his bathroom only for minimal work to be completed before the builder vanished.
“He promised us up and down that it would be done well before Christmas, and here we are 12 months later,” Mr Thomason told news.com.au.
“He’s a serial scam artist.”
Yet another self-described victim of the builder’s conduct is Myrilla Nelthropp, a Melbourne woman who took Mr Jankovic to court and won.
In a judgment handed down at the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) in July, Mr Jankovic was ordered to pay back $7000, plus an additional $220 to cover Ms Nelthropp’s application fee.
So far, no money has been forthcoming
Ms Nelthropp said her next step is to take the judgment to the magistrate’s court to enforce the order.
The judgment followed an 18-month-long ordeal to have her deck built, after the mum first engaged Mr Jankovic in February last year.
He never completed any work at her house.
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“The system is completely and utterly broken,” Mr Thomason said.
He has chosen not to pursue Mr Jankovic through VCAT because of the difficulties of recovering debts even after a court judgment although he did at first engage a solicitor.
Mr Thomason hired the tradie to redo two bathrooms for $45,000. Upon the builder’s request, he paid half of this upfront as a deposit.
He claims he was coaxed into paying more because Mr Jankovic did some of the tiling for one bathroom.
So confident was Mr Thomason, in fact, that he recommended the tradesman to his neighbour, who has also been left out of pocket.
“He didn’t just do a runner, he would return our texts,” Mr Thomason recalled.
The tradie hit Mr Thomason with a number of excuses about why the work was dragging on including that his wife was sick.
“He was basically telling us she was on the verge of death,” the customer recalled.
News.com.au understands Mr Jankovic is not married.
The same happened with Gemma.
“He turned up, he was very nice and he was very polite, he needed a 50 per cent deposit,” she recalled.
Mr Jankovic did up part of her deck so she paid him $2400.
At first she thought his excuses for the delays were “totally legit”, including having multiple family issues, injuring his hand and bad weather.
But as time wore on, doubts started to set in.
News.com.au previously spoke to Sandy and Peter Jahnke who paid Mr Jankovic $27,000 for a half-completed deck.
They have issued him with legal letters demanding a refund for $15,000, calculated on the work that had yet to be completed but which had been paid for.
After the couple paid him $27,000 in progress payments, the tradie hit them with a litany of excuses about why the job was delayed, including that the supplier had stuffed up orders, that he was sick, that his whole family was sick, that his wife was sick, that his apprentice was sick and that it was raining – even when it wasn’t.
Name withheld for privacy reasons
alex.turner-cohen@news.com.au