TOOELE, Utah — A man is facing charges of stealing more than $40,000 from customers after accepting their money for landscaping work but never completing it.
Alen George Saenz, 31, was arrested Monday and ordered to be held without bail for the latest in a string of alleged fraud incidents in Tooele County.
Saenz, a resident of Tooele and formerly Stansbury Park, is charged with four felony counts of communications fraud and four felony counts of theft, along with one felony count of "theft pursuant to a rental agreement." Four alleged victims were his customers, and one local business accused him of not returning a rented Bobcat machine and failing to pay for it.
Tooele City Police investigated four instances where customers claimed Saenz charged them for landscaping work but never completed the jobs.
The first was in September 2022. The customer said she paid Saenz $11,324, and he never showed up to do the job.
The second was in October 2022. The customer said she paid him $12,830. He allegedly gave her the name of a company that he worked for and was licensed with, but when she contacted the company, she was told Saenz did not work there and was not licensed through them. In this case, the victim said Saenz returned $5,000 in the form of a cashier's check, but not the rest of the amount owed.
Another instance in October 2022 left a customer out $11,600.
Saenz was charged for these first three cases in August and December of 2023.
However, he allegedly ran the same scheme earlier this year and was finally arrested with no option for bail. The most recent case saw him receiving $10,250 from a customer between January and February. The customer said they saw Saenz at the job site a few times, then had no contact for weeks before reporting the case to police. Saenz was arrested Monday, then charged formally and ordered by a judge to be held without bail the next day.
These cases added up to $41,004 (including the $5,000 returned to one customer).
In addition, Saenz is charged with stealing from a Bobcat rental company based in West Valley City. He rented a track loader from the business in May 2022 and allegedly never returned it. The business also said the credit card on file for the rental was declined. The loader was recovered the next month, and charges were filed in January 2023.
There was one additional case of allegedly defrauding a customer in Salt Lake County, but the charges have since been dismissed without prejudice due to "the State's inability to move forward in this case," according to court documents.
