South Holland woman lost thousands to name-changing contractor who ghosted her
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CHICAGO (WBBM) — A South Holland woman said she was left high and dry after paying thousands of dollars to have her swimming pool fixed, only for the contractor to vanish.
Venus Scott is one of more than a dozen homeowners who said they were taken by the same man using different names. The pattern goes back more than a decade.
Scott said she’s happy with her backyard pool oasis now, but it took more than a year to be able to swim in it.
“All of this had to be redone. It’s a whole brand hew liner that was put in,” she said.
When she bought the house and pool as is, she knew she’d have to put some money in to restore it.
She brought in two companies for quotes and “Sunlife Swimming Pool Care” based in Joliet came in way below the competitor.
A man named Brian McIntosh came to her South Holland home last year, collected a $1,000 deposit, and said his crew would be back soon to start the work.
But then, the crew missed two appointments in a row. In the meantime, she was required to pay more.
The next time, McIntosh came with several bottles of chlorine.
“They poured maybe about six bottles of chlorine for algae inside the pool, and left it all just sitting right here. We had to clean it up,” Scott said.
McIntosh said he’d be back to start the job.
“Of course, that never happened. I never saw them again,” Scott said.
She sent them a total of $5,425, and the only work they did was pour chlorine into the pool.
After nearly a year of trying to get a refund, Scott ended up paying another company $11,000 to actually finish the job, and she learned that the cheap “liner patching” that SunLife promised her wasn’t even possible.
“So, it was no way they could have fixed it for that amount. So, I feel like it was a scam all along,” Scott said.
She went online and saw review after review from homeowners who said they were also left high and dry.
It turned out the man who came to her house wasn’t Brian McIntosh, it was a man named David Sroge, and CBS News Chicago knows his name well.
He’s the name-changing contractor who was at the center of Investigator Dave Savini’s story in 2015.
Sroge was sent to prison for a year in 2016 for home repair fraud in Cook County.
Before that, Sroge had a 2012 conviction in Indiana where police said he took $9,000 from a senior citizen for work he did not do.
In May 2026, a warrant was issued for his arrest in Will County. He also has an active warrant in Kane County as well as countless civil cases against him in Illinois and Northwest Indiana.
“How was it possible for this to continue to go on?” Scott said.
Sroge also is named in at least nine complaints submitted to the Illinois Attorney General’s office over the last few years, and each one recounts the same story – thousands of dollars paid and no services rendered before Sroge disappeared.
And as police are currently searching for Sroge, CBS News Chicago hasn’t been able to find him either.
Scott said Sroge contacted her using four different phone numbers, but CBS News Chicago could not reach him at any of those numbers.
In response to an email to SunLife, someone claiming to be Susan Hanover assured “a full resolution.” She even provided another email address and phone number to try, but CBS News Chicago got no response.
As a result of reaching out, Scott said someone from SunLife contacted her offering a refund, but then ghosted her again.
She said she’s not holding her breath for a refund, but she’s speaking out for another reason.
“If I can stop another family from going through that, that would be great,” she said.
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