A Midlothian builder has admitted cheating customers out of more than £20,000 after taking payments for work that was left incomplete and for materials that were never properly accounted for. Grant Peters, 39, from Dalkeith, pleaded guilty to four charges at Edinburgh Sheriff Court.

The court heard Peters offered to carry out building work between February 2020 and July 2021, but only partially completed the jobs and failed to repay customers despite repeated requests. One victim in Dalkeith paid him £12,000 for work that was left incomplete between September 2020 and March 2021. Another customer in Newtongrange was charged £7,000 for a job that was never fully carried out, while a third customer from Dalkeith paid £2,650 for building materials and work.

He also admitted obtaining money by fraud and stealing a quantity of building materials from an address in Dalkeith between February 2020 and October 2020. The case involved both incomplete building work and theft of materials, and the offending spanned more than a year. Peters appeared at Edinburgh Sheriff Court, where his guilty pleas brought the case to a formal end for now.

The scale of the losses gives the case its weight. More than £20,000 came from victims who expected home improvements and instead were left chasing answers that never came. In one case, the work in Dalkeith stretched over months and still ended unfinished, a pattern that mirrors the wider conduct laid out in court.

That pattern matters because the offence was not a one-off job gone wrong. It covered several customers, different payments and a separate theft of building materials, all tied to the same period between February 2020 and July 2021. For people paying in advance for work on their homes, the damage is not just financial. It leaves unfinished rooms, delayed repairs and a trail of requests that were ignored.

The tension in the case is in the overlap between the two strands of offending. Peters was not only paid for work he did not complete; he was also said to have taken materials from an address in Dalkeith during the same general period. That combination makes the fraud easier to trace and harder to dismiss as a simple business failure. It points to conduct that was sustained, not accidental.

What happens next will be decided by the court as it moves on from the guilty pleas. For now, Peters has admitted the core facts behind the complaint, and the record shows a builder from Dalkeith who took money, left jobs unfinished and failed to put matters right when customers asked him to.