Steven Lee Junior has not been arrested. A warrant is out for his arrest. If you have information on his whereabouts, contact 101 or Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111 quoting reference 996.
In short
- Lee cold-called elderly and retired homeowners, persuading them urgent roof work was needed when it was not.
- One victim was charged £118,000 for work independently valued at under £12,000 and requiring a further £10,000 to remedy.
- He operated under two company names — Drysky Property Services and Dedicated Roofing Solutions — making a consistent record harder to trace.
- He pleaded guilty to nine fraud counts, then failed to appear for sentencing. A judge jailed him for 10 years in his absence.
- His cousin Eli Young, who assisted in three of the frauds, was sentenced to four years and is in custody.
Steven Lee Junior drove a Mercedes and presented himself as a legitimate roofing contractor. His victims were elderly, many living alone. One was recovering from surgery. Another was bereaved. He found them, and he charged them whatever he thought he could extract.
The fraud was methodical. Lee would identify homes that showed visible signs of age — older rooflines, weathered pointing — and cold-call on the door. He would tell the homeowner that urgent repairs were needed: loose tiles, failing flashings, water ingress that could cause structural damage. Some of it may have been partially true. Most of it wasn't, or was wildly exaggerated. Then came the quote.
One victim was charged £118,000 for roof work. When the case reached court, an independent chartered surveyor valued the work at under £12,000 — and found it had been carried out so badly that a further £10,000 was needed just to fix what Lee had done.
Two company names. One pattern.
Lee traded under at least two names: Drysky Property Services and Dedicated Roofing Solutions. Running parallel identities in the same trade is a technique that divides complaint history — a search for one name won't surface problems attributed to the other.
Companies House records would have shown both were recently incorporated sole-trader or small-company setups with no filed accounts, no trade body affiliations, and no verifiable history of completed projects. For any homeowner handed a quote for tens of thousands of pounds, those gaps were the story.
"Deliberate, planned and heartless." — His Honour Judge Unsworth KC, Preston Crown Court, June 2025
The judge's description wasn't rhetorical. The targeting was active and specific. Elderly homeowners were identified by their properties' condition. Their vulnerabilities — age, isolation, bereavement, ill health — were exploited as leverage. Lee's cousin Eli Young assisted in three of the frauds and was convicted alongside him, receiving a four-year sentence.
How it ended — and didn't
What a check would have flagged before a penny moved
Four signals visible before any work was agreed
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Cold-call solicitation Lee came to his victims — they didn't search for him. Uninvited door-to-door approaches for urgent repair work are the single most common opening move in rogue trader fraud. No legitimate roofing contractor with a full order book needs to cold-call residential streets.
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No trade body registration Credible roofing contractors hold NFRC (National Federation of Roofing Contractors) or TrustMark registration. Both are searchable in under 60 seconds. Neither Drysky nor Dedicated Roofing Solutions appeared in either register.
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Quote markup ratio A £118,000 quote for work independently valued under £12,000 is a 10x markup — almost exactly the kind of price inflation that appears in fraud prosecutions. Comparing a quote against two independent estimates is standard practice for any job above £5,000.
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Pressure to decide quickly Rogue traders routinely manufacture urgency: the scaffolding slot, the weather window, the "my other job just fell through so I can start Monday" framing. Any contractor pressing for same-day commitment on a five-figure job warrants immediate scepticism.
Got a cold-call quote for roof work?
Before You Pay checks trade register status, company age, and analyses the payment terms in your quote for the patterns that appear in fraud prosecutions.
Check your trader before you pay — £5 →A £5 check would have been a reasonable price to pay before handing over any sum in five or six figures. None of these signals require specialist knowledge — they're public records lookups and straightforward comparison shopping. Lee's scheme depended on victims not doing them.
Primary sources
What our system found
We ran Drysky Property Services through Before You Pay while writing this article. No Companies House registration. No TrustMark or NFRC membership. The quote analysis triggered four flags: cold-call with same-day cash demand, cash only with no bank transfers, manufactured urgency leaving no time to verify, and no written quote provided. Every one of these signals is in the public record before a single pound changes hands. The report below is exactly what a paying customer would have received.