A North Texas Contractor Got 30 Years in Prison After Taking More Than $300,000 From Clients, Including One Who Paid $180,000 Over the Phone

A 30-year prison sentence closed the Tarrant County theft case against North Texas contractor Jeremy Jerod Zeno on Oct. 9, after he pleaded guilty to stealing more than $300,000 from clients who paid him to build and renovate. Tarrant County prosecutors said none of that money has been recovered, according to FOX 4 Dallas-Fort Worth. One of those clients, from the Royse City and Rockwall area, paid Zeno $180,000 over the phone and lost all of it.

The case began with a single complaint to a suburban police department and grew into a first-degree felony case covering clients in several North Texas counties.

The clients who paid and waited

FOX 4 reported that the investigation started in 2024, when Terry Stevenson, who lives in Iowa, filed a complaint with the Benbrook Police Department. Stevenson had paid Zeno $40,000 to renovate a barn into a condominium. The work barely started before Zeno stopped returning calls.

Stevenson told the station that Zeno “kept saying the materials are coming.” The materials never arrived. Stevenson flew to Texas to testify, Moneywise reported, and police said Zeno had relied on excuses, aliases and long silences while presenting himself as a trusted builder.

Lee Robinson of Arlington lost $35,000 on a construction project in Alvarado. In 2025, he posted a warning on Facebook about what he called “the worst contractor in DFW.”

The losses did not stop with homeowners. Selvin Rosa, whose Dallas company Universal Foundation Experts poured a foundation for a home in Hood County, said his crew was never paid. Rosa told FOX 4 that a contractor who does this is destroying clients’ homes, their investments and their lives, and he said Zeno deserved the 30 years because “it is not his first rodeo.”

A scheme that kept going on bond

Prosecutors said Zeno continued taking money while he was already on deferred adjudication in Hood County for a similar crime, and while he was out on bond in the Tarrant County case itself.

Deferred adjudication is a form of community supervision in Texas. A defendant who completes it can have the case dismissed; one who violates it can be convicted and sentenced on the original charge. Taking new clients’ money during that period was one of the facts prosecutors put in front of the court.

Why $300,000 changed the charge

In Texas, the dollar value of stolen property sets the level of a theft charge. Under Section 31.03 of the Texas Penal Code, theft becomes a first-degree felony when the value stolen is $300,000 or more. Theft of $150,000 to just under $300,000 is a second-degree felony, and smaller amounts fall into lower tiers.

Prosecutors did not need a single $300,000 victim to reach that line. Section 31.09 allows amounts taken “pursuant to one scheme or continuing course of conduct,” from the same or several victims, to be treated as one offense and added together to set the grade.

A first-degree felony in Texas carries a prison term of 5 to 99 years or life, plus a possible fine of up to $10,000, under Section 12.32. Zeno’s 30-year sentence sits well within that range.

Other contractor theft cases this year

The North Texas sentence is one of several long prison terms handed to contractors in 2026. Moneywise noted a Nevada contractor sentenced in February to 4 to 10 years for taking more than $308,000 from homeowners, and an Ohio pole barn builder who received 17 to 22 years in March after a jury convicted him on 47 felony counts involving more than $400,000.

Those cases share a pattern with the Zeno case: large payments made before work started, projects that stalled, and contractors who stopped communicating once the money cleared.

What the Texas Attorney General tells homeowners

The Texas Attorney General’s consumer page on how to avoid home improvement scams addresses the same pattern the Zeno victims described. The office says contractors typically ask for part of the cost in advance, but full payment up front is a common tactic of scammers who take the money and leave without finishing, or even starting, the job. Even with a reputable contractor, it advises against paying in full until the work is complete and inspected.

The page also recommends:

• Choosing a contractor with an established physical address.
• Getting written bids from more than one contractor, with detailed scopes of work and specified materials, and being wary of a bid far below the others.
• Asking for references and, where possible, visiting homes where the contractor has worked.
• Never signing a contract with blanks, since blanks “get filled in later.”
• Following the contract’s partial payment schedule and inspecting each milestone before paying.
• Not signing a certificate of completion until all work is finished and the site is clean.

One Texas rule speaks directly to large jobs. For projects over $5,000, the attorney general’s office says the contractor must deposit the homeowner’s payments in a construction account at a financial institution, and it suggests asking for written verification and monitoring deposits and withdrawals.

The office also warns that a homeowner can still be liable when a contractor fails to pay subcontractors or suppliers, and the property may be subject to a lien for the unpaid amount even though the homeowner never contracted with those businesses directly.

On financing, the page advises shopping for loans separately from bids and comparing interest rates, finance charges and repayment terms, because contractor-arranged credit may not be the best deal.

For the clients in the Tarrant County case, the sentence does not come with their money. Prosecutors said the funds remain unrecovered.

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This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.

Image: Famartin – CC BY-SA 4.0/Wikimedia Commons