For a Manchester, New Hampshire homeowner who had already lost her house to fire, the path back should have led through a contractor she trusted with her rebuild. Instead, it led to a criminal courtroom. Jason Tessier, a former home improvement contractor from Derry, took a $108,000 prepayment to reconstruct a home that had burned down — then pocketed a large share of it rather than doing the work.

In July 2025, that scheme ended with a felony conviction and a prison sentence. According to the New Hampshire Department of Justice, Tessier stole more than $60,000 of the money entrusted to him, a betrayal made worse by the fact that his victim was already trying to recover from catastrophic loss. His case is a textbook example of how prepayment fraud works — and why the structure of a construction payment matters as much as the character of the person receiving it.

What Happened

The core facts are not in dispute, because Tessier admitted them. Attorney General John M. Formella announced that Jason Tessier, age 49, was sentenced on a class A felony count of theft by unauthorized taking or transfer and a class A misdemeanor count of unfair or deceptive acts or practices in violation of the New Hampshire Consumer Protection Act, after pleading guilty on July 14, 2025, in Hillsborough County Superior Court – Northern District to charges stemming from his criminal misconduct as a home improvement contractor.

The money at the heart of the case was substantial. Tessier stole $60,563 from the victim who paid Tessier $108,000 as a prepayment for rebuilding the victim's house that had burnt down. The theft happened between April 2 and Dec. 31, 2020, officials said.

The sentence reflected the seriousness of the conduct. The Court sentenced Tessier to serve 2 ½ to 7 years in the New Hampshire State Prison for the theft by unauthorized taking or transfer charge. On the unfair or deceptive acts or practices charge, the Court sentenced Tessier to 1 year at the Hillsborough County House of Corrections, fully suspended, with the suspended sentence ending 3 years after release on the theft charge.

Tessier stole $60,563 from the victim who paid Tessier $108,000 as a prepayment for rebuilding the victim's house that had burnt down.— New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella, news release via Union Leader, July 17, 2025

Why It Was So Easy

The mechanics of this fraud were simple, and that is precisely the problem. A homeowner rebuilding after a fire is often working against a compressed timeline, dealing with insurance proceeds, and eager to get shelter restored. That urgency creates leverage for a contractor who asks for money up front. Once a large lump sum changes hands with no independent party controlling its release, nothing structurally prevents the recipient from simply keeping it.

Tessier had also been on the state's radar before. In addition to his theft, Tessier misused the $60,563 in violation of the terms of an Assurance of Discontinuance he entered into with the Department of Justice in 2018. An assurance of discontinuance is a legal agreement where someone accused of violating a law or regulation agrees to stop the illegal activity, without admitting fault. In other words, a prior consumer-protection agreement did nothing to physically protect the next victim's cash, because that agreement had no control over how a specific homeowner's payment would be held or disbursed.

The pattern is common nationally. Fraudsters collect a large down payment, start demolition, and vanish before finishing the job. Disaster survivors are especially exposed — following a natural disaster, scammers persuade homeowners to sign over their insurance payments. And the scale of the underlying problem is enormous: the Federal Trade Commission received 81,925 reports of home improvement fraud in 2024.

The Investigation and Prosecution

The case was worked through New Hampshire's consumer-protection apparatus rather than treated as a simple contract dispute — a critical distinction, since many contractor failures never rise to criminal charges. Investigator Calice Couchman-Ducey investigated the case, and Assistant Attorneys General JR Davis and Warren G. Cormack prosecuted it.

Proving criminal theft, as opposed to shoddy or unfinished work, is often the hardest part of these cases. Prosecutors elsewhere have noted the gap: as one Delaware official put it, "there is daylight between doing a bad job and committing a crime." What pushed Tessier's conduct across that line was the combination of taking the money, failing to perform, and doing so in violation of an existing agreement with the Department of Justice — evidence of intent rather than mere business failure.

The state also used the outcome to point other victims toward help. The Department of Justice urged that anyone who has been the victim of home contractor fraud or theft contact their local police department and file a consumer complaint with the Consumer Protection and Antitrust Bureau.

What Escrow Would Have Changed

The single structural failure that made this theft possible was that $108,000 went directly into the contractor's hands. Escrow — holding funds with a neutral third party that releases money only as verified milestones are completed — is designed to eliminate exactly that vulnerability.

Under an escrow or construction-account model, the homeowner's payment does not sit in the contractor's account waiting to be spent on personal expenses. It is held separately and disbursed against proof of progress: foundation poured, framing inspected, permits pulled. Had Tessier's victim's funds been escrowed, he could not have simply withdrawn $60,563 without performing the work, because the release of each installment would have been contingent on independently confirmed completion. The most he could have collected without building anything is an initial, limited draw — not the bulk of a six-figure rebuild.

Some states already recognize this. In Texas, if a homestead improvement exceeds $5,000 in cost, the contractor is required by law to deposit the homeowner's payments in a construction account at a financial institution. Consumer regulators also warn that the demand for full payment up front is itself a red flag: it is notorious that scammers involved in door-to-door rip-offs will ask for payment in full in advance, and then abscond without completing — sometimes without even starting — the job.

Escrow does not require trusting the contractor at all, which is the point. It replaces personal trust with a verification mechanism. Assurances of discontinuance, licensing rules, and after-the-fact prosecutions all matter, but they operate after the money is gone. Escrow is the one protection that would have stopped the loss before it happened — turning a $60,563 theft into, at most, a stalled project with the homeowner's funds still intact and recoverable.

Sources