Aug. 15—Kokomo resident Dennis Sanders, who pleaded guilty earlier this year in a home-improvement fraud scheme which mainly targeted elderly people, will now have to pay his victims back over $88,000.

The move was announced during a restitution hearing Friday in Howard Superior Court 1, in which many of Sanders' victims were present.

Sanders pleaded guilty back in May to home improvement fraud and corrupt business influence, both Level 5 felonies, and was subsequently sentenced to 12 years of supervised probation.

One of those years will be suspended for time already served in jail.

According to court records filed Friday, Sanders will have to pay back $88,920 to 12 individual victims, as well as two sets of couples.

The largest individual amount ordered to be paid is $39,475, per court records, while the lowest is $600.

Court documents did not indicate how Sanders will repay each of the victims in the case, but officials did note that the Howard County Adult Probation Department has been ordered to prepare a repayment schedule.

Sanders was first charged for home improvement fraud in July 2019, and he, at one time, faced 23 charges in both Howard and Miami counties.

Then, in November 2021, Sanders was also charged with corrupt business influence, saying that he knowingly received proceeds derived from a pattern of racketeering.

Probable cause affidavits filed in connection with the fraud scheme all shared a similar story too.

People — most of whom were 70 or older — would call Sanders after seeing his advertisements for Ace Handyman and Construction in the local media, probable cause affidavits filed in the case noted.

Sanders would then in turn convince those people to let him conduct work on their homes and pay the money up front.

But then he'd never do the work, court records indicated.

In one such case, according to Tribune archives, a woman told investigators that she paid Sanders $3,200 to make minor repairs around her house.

She added that Sanders ended up bringing two men with him to do the work, and then he left the two men stranded at her residence for several hours.

Another female victim told the Tribune in August 2019 that Sanders was at her home when he received a phone call from a person that he said was his daughter.

When he got off the phone, he told the woman his daughter was sick and on experimental medication that his insurance wouldn't pay for, though investigators say none of that story was true.