GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Jeffrey Deans says he’s still trying to get his money back from Tony Wilkins.
“I thought he was an attorney,” Deans told Target 8 investigators.
He said he was introduced to Wilkins through a friend who had Wilkins doing legal work for her. Deans said Wilkins made himself look like a lawyer, bringing a man he said was a private eye to one meeting and a note-taking secretary to another.
He said Wilkins kept asking him for money for various legal tasks.
“He kept nickel-and-diming me,” Dean said.
But Tony Wilkins is not a lawyer — although he’s played one before. In 2007, the Michigan Bar Association sued him and got a court order to make him stop posing as an attorney after he took money from several people, including a woman who paid him $3,000 when she was desperately seeking a lawyer for her jailed son.
Target 8 investigators caught Wilkins in a home improvement scam in 2008. At that time, Wilkins admitted he took money from a homeowner for a window job but that he “spent the money, probably almost immediately, on … other things.”
In a 2012 probation report, an agent said he had reports of Wilkins trying to con churches out of financial help with bogus stories and renting out fake apartments. The agent wrote that when he confronted Wilkins about it, Wilkins promised, “From this day forward, no more scamming.”
Full story: WOOD TV8