BLOOMINGTON, Minn. (WCCO) – Sitting on the front porch of her Bloomington home, elderly homeowner Pat Wildgen is wise beyond her years and not about to fall for a fly-by-night offer.
“He said he wanted to use my driveway,” Wildgen.
An asphalt crew told the retiree that they were working in the neighborhood and wanted to park some equipment in Wildgen’s drive. The next thing she knew, it was her driveway they were paving.
Wildgen never ordered the work and her driveway wasn’t in need of repair.
“He thrust a clipboard and said, ‘Sign here,’” Wildgen said. “I said, ‘For what? I didn’t order anything.’ He said, ‘You’d better sign here because you already got it.”
Half of her driveway had been paved over with a very poor job of asphalt overlay.
“I just said, ‘Get out of my house,’ as he was standing in the doorway,” Wildgen said. “I yelled at him. I was very unpleasant and smacked him in the legs.”
Yes, she convinced the fraudster with her cane — two smacks on the legs.
“It was really hard,” Wildgen said. “They gathered up their stuff and I looked out the door and they were going down the street.”
After calling police, Wildgen called around and received some expensive bids to repair the mess. It would cost around $3,200 to remove the old pavement and replace it with a new driveway. That’s when a local sealcoating contractor, Jet-Black, learned of Pat’s troubles.
“It’s a carefully planned scam,” said Nick Kelso, Jet-Black’s director of franchising. “They target vulnerable people and that’s what happened in this case. They knocked on the wrong door with her.”
Jet-Black is now offering to fix the mess, free of charge. An appreciative Pat Wildgen says she will make it worth their troubles.
“I’ll have cookies and stuff for them,” Wildgen said.
Police are advising homeowners to report any suspicious door-to-door offers for driveway work.
