Maine BUYERS BEWARE

By: Maine Journal News

Buying items on local Maine swap and sell sites should always come with a “Buyer Beware” notice. Never is this notice truer if custom woodworking items are offered for sale by Melissa and Donald Levesque or one of their many aliases.

Unfortunately, it may be difficult to determine whether you are dealing with Melissa or Donald because they also use a variety of aliases such as Sandy Cross, Sandy Smith, Robert Frost, Robert Frost, Jr.

Once the warnings on sales sites about Melissa and Donald are spread, they appear to create new business names. Here are some of the names they have used: C&C Custom Woodworking, The Knotty Pine Barn, For the Love of Wood, M&D Primitive Country Corner. Every single one of these businesses have customers claiming they were scammed or received shoddy work.

Currently, Melissa and Don have moved from Turner, Maine and their current whereabouts are unknown. They have previously lived in the following locations in Maine: Sidney, Livermore, Cumberland Center, Standish, Steep Falls, West Newfield, Buxton, Windham and in Norwich, NY.

Let’s get to the alleged victims of Melissa and Donald Levesque. These are just the ones we know about. First is Terry Turner. Terry claims Melissa took her for $6,000 and she has filed a lawsuit to recoup her losses. Here is Terry’s statement to Maine Journal News:

“They, Melissa and Donald Levesque, took me for 6000.00. They were supposed to do three different jobs for me. Lay laminate flooring in which I bought and paid for all materials and had delivered to my home. They did come and do some flooring did not finish the job and wasted a lot of flooring cutting the wrong sizes etc. They fought the whole time they were here. They said they couldn’t finish as Donald had forgot his knee pads and his knees were bothering him. So, my husband finished laying the flooring the next day (Sunday) because they weren’t going to make it back and we couldn’t leave our kitchen floor half done. I then hired a friend to finish up the trim work and registers that needed to be cut out and installed. The second job was a paint job for my hutch, buffet, table and chairs to match my Job #3 pine kitchen cupboards they were going to build and install. I paid in full to get the job up and running and to know I had the funds for it all paid. She tried to have me have my flooring delivered to her. Thank god I didn’t! I found them on Facebook as anyone I knew locally was busy and couldn’t do it. I see their ad on Facebook swap and sell site and she had good reviews listed and the pictures (of their supposedly built projects. Come to find out they had just photoshopped pictures from other people’s work and from magazine photos. I paid them in three different checks each stating what it was payment for. I was told two months to complete the job, 6 months after meeting her I just kept getting excuses, and strung along and no response then blocked. I called AG office and filed a formal complaint, paid all my fees to file each step of the way and to have papers served sat with a lawyer for a consult and was told to try small claims but it had to be under 6000.00. So I gave them half the credit for the flooring and brought amount down to 5700.00. We went to court I was granted repayment. Melissa gave me 1000.00 cash that day hoping I would settle out of court. The bank envelope she gave me had mom written on the back and scratched out with a pen. She made out a repayment plan for the judge and defaulted first week. I sent her a text the first two weeks and told her court was going to continue. Had them re-served back in March, then Covid came and courts closed down. Still waiting on a court date for default.”

Here are more alleged victims of the Levesques, all of which have basically the same story:

It appears the payments have been an issue since they lived in NY. Here is a judgment received against Melissa and Donald Levesque in New York.

Customers are not the only victims of the Levesques. This business, Wood Mill of Maine, received a check for payment of goods. Unfortunately for Wood Mill of Maine, the check was returned because it was written on a closed account.

The reviews on the business pages tell the same story.

Joshua Pettis is correct. A review on the business page is from Donald Levesque aka Robert Frost. Sandy Cross aka Melissa Levesque thanks him for his positive review.

Diego, an alleged victim from 2018 says had this conversation with Melissa Levesque.

It appears as though people die and get sick around Melissa quite a bit or she says they do.

Melissa Levesque claims to be on disability and accepts cash payments for her work, whether or not she comes through with the final product. It makes one wonder whether this income is reported and updated with the disability office (or IRS for that matter).

While Melissa is allegedly on disability and Donald is allegedly out of work because people “keep calling his work,” they seem to be able to purchase quite a few expensive items:

The bottom line in this BUYER BEWARE Public Service announcement is that if you ever see these people asking you for money to make you custom wood furniture, think long and hard about it. If one has a good reputation and delivers the goods and services promised then aliases and multiple business names would not be needed.

As always, thank you for reading. We can be found on Facebook at www.facebook.com/mainejournalnews (you have to type in the entire address because FB is hiding us in the search box). You can also email tips and story ideas to mainejournalnews@gmail.com.

15 thoughts on “Maine BUYERS BEWARE”

  1. Maine journal you should do an article on Qualey Granite Veazie Maine, I would say even more crooked based on the experience I had. Call the Veazie police if you want some verification.

  2. I don’t understand how you can just post about someone without even getting the other side.. How can even post and put these pictures of these 2 without even getting the other side.. There is always another side to be told .. this is unverifiable and unbelievably what this world has become… You have put these 2 people in danger and there have been threats and death threats because of what you have posted… You have put there lives in danger. Do you even know what the truth is.. I don’t get how you can post something like this. You should be a shame what kind of news place is this.

    1. “Christina” if that’s who you really are, we should not be ashamed to write a Buyer Beware article. We’ve had dozens of people reach out to us and not all of them are even listed in the article. People who take money and never follow through on delivering a product are the ones who should be ashamed. If you know where Don and Melissa are living now, please let me know. I’d love to go out there and interview them.

      1. Isn’t that interesting? We noticed the same thing after reading dozens of messages and posts Melissa wrote which were sent to us for review. I’m sure Melissa wouldn’t use an alias to email us or comment on our article…

    2. are you related to them do they live in Maine or NY i found two profiles on him and one of them says he lives in Norwich, New York and the other one well he has no pics of him self but he does have a pic of that nice truck as his profile pic and is set to private if i wanted to i could probably find hers but i had enough with him not that it was hard to find cause trust me it wasn’t how is an article putting there lives in danger and maybe if they were not hiding there side of the story might have been told you can’t charge people for things not do what you were paid for and not expect the ugly truth to surface at some point or maybe you do the same thing they do and that is why you are so upset about them being exposed you know the saying birds of a feather flock together

    3. Dumb con artists from NY coming to Maine thinking they can rip off the “simple folk” should be called out for their BS. I read through this with an open mind at first, but people from random places in Maine don’t just rally together over social media to screw some random people over, usually there’s a reason for this kind of out cry from SO MANY different people around the state. And Maine’s a perty big state. Seems like these two ticked off the wrong people and if by “threats” you actually mean “court dates” then it serves them right. D ok n’t do scummy stuff and you won’t get called out for it. Period.

  3. I have given Melissa Levesque a deposit for a desk she said she & her husband would make, That was 2 1/2 months ago and she keeps coming up with excuses about drying. I told her to take some photos to show the desk and she never sends them. She was living in Turner Maine and her phone I just reached/texted her on is 207-XXX-XXXX. She texted me that she was going to send me a money order for my deposit. From what other people are saying, the refund will not happen.

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