SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON — Cowlitz and Clark County authorities believe that a man who allegedly defrauded an elderly Longview woman of $2,500 may have run similar scams against seniors in Pacific County and other parts of Southwest Washington.

Cowlitz County Sheriff’s deputies on Jan. 20 arrested Christopher Marion McNicholas, 44, of Woodland. He has since been released, but he is facing several felony charges, including theft and criminal impersonation.

A Jan. 21 press release from the Cowlitz County Sheriff’s Office said McNicholas, the former owner construction-related businesses, first took a $1,200 check from a 91-year-old woman to repair a leaky window. He returned on subsequent visits to demand and additional $300, then $1,000 and then $2,500. At that point, the woman’s financial advisor canceled the final check and asked another window repair business to provide an estimate. That company said the repair would not have cost more than $400.

McNicholas never did any work.

According to the Longview Daily News, media coverage of that incident prompted other alleged victims to contact police. An 75-year-old Vancouver woman said she recently wrote a $1,000 check to McNicholas to replace her windows, but later canceled the check after growing suspicious. McNicholas returned and pressured her to give him more money. A 79-year-old Kelso man said McNicholas in November took $310 for work that was never performed. McNicholas told the man he worked for GreenTech Innovations, a company that has not been registered with the state since 2013. Investigators with the Longview Police Department and Clark County Sheriff’s Office are also now conducting investigations.

In a Thursday phone interview CCSO Chief Criminal Deputy Charlie Rosenzweig said that when deputies searched McNicholas’ vehicle, they discovered hundreds of pages of documents that suggest he had other victims around the region.

“There were some names and addresses from people who reside in the Long Beach area,” Rosenzweig said.

It will take investigators quite some time to go through the papers they found, so it’s still not clear which transactions were legitimate, and which may have been fraudulent.

“If somebody in Pacific County had any business arrangement with this guy in which they believe they were a victim, they really should contact the [local police department],” Rosenzweig said.

It appears that McNicholas, who even kept a profile on the professional networking site Linked-In, ran two other businesses during the last several years; Pacific Coast Vinyl & Remodeling, a wood-floor laying and glass business; and GreenTech Innovations, a contracting company. He re-registered each business under slightly different names over the years, but none of the registrations are still listed as “active” in state databases.

Records from the state Department of Labor and Industries show that McNicholas has been the subject of past violations and complaints that resulted in fines totaling more than $15,000.

Pacific Coast Vinyl and Remodel (later re-registered as a new company under the name Pacific Coast Vinyl & Remodel, Inc.) had one L&I violation for doing work outside the scope of his specialty, and another for altering manufactured home without a permit. The re-registered company also had one violation, for failure to get a required permit. All three of those violations were paid in full. In June 2011, a woman filed a $7,602 complaint against Pacific Coast — his bond company paid the complainant in that case.

His other company, GreenTech Innovations, Inc., incurred four violations for unregistered contracting in 2012. Three came from customers and one from another contractor who was concerned about McNicholas’ conduct. McNicholas was fined at least $3,000 for those violations, and the unpaid fines have been sent to collections.

By 2013, GreenTech belonged to a different owner, Geri Lynn Newberg, but L&I and Department of Revenue records show that Newberg used two Woodland addresses McNicholas had used for his businesses. L&I staff audited Newberg and found that McNicholas was working for her. She was fined for having a worker without an open industrial insurance account. She has since closed her business registrations with L&I and DOR.

Most recently, L&I fined McNicholas $5,000 in July 2014, after one of his customers said they had been scammed. That fine also has not been paid.

Friday morning, a staffer at the Washington State Attorney General’s office said there appeared to be at least 25 complaints associated with McNicholas and his businesses. The records were not immediately available, so it is not possible to say yet how many of those complaints have been substantiated.