Complaints dogged Charlotte log cabin company for a decade, new NC records show
Records from the North Carolina Attorney General’s Office provided new details about a Charlotte log cabin company that has been accused of fraud by former customers.
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The Charlotte Observer previously identified at least 50 customers in 22 states who each lost tens of thousands of dollars when American Log Homes and Cabins abruptly shuttered in January — just weeks after accepting large payments from customers. A law firm that once represented the company said total customer losses amounted to “millions of dollars.”
Now nearly two dozen additional customers from across the U.S. have reported being left empty-handed, copies of complaints submitted to the attorney general’s office show. The Charlotte Observer obtained the complaints through a public records request.
Would-be homeowners paid the company between $14,500 to over $25,000 for discounted log home shell kits and were told they wouldn’t receive refunds following the company’s closure. The log cabin seller was the subject of an exclusive investigation by the Observer in May.
Attorneys representing owner Michele Wilson Szabo and American Log Homes have said that the company’s closure was unavoidable, and characterized the business as previously having a track record of operating without issues.
But the new records obtained by the Observer show several customers accused the company of taking funds without delivering log cabin kits as far back as 2017, when it operated under the name Log Concepts LLC.
When asked about the decade-old complaints, an attorney for Szabo referred the Observer to a previous statement that said American Log Homes and Cabins had “operated for 24 years without any issues.”
“Michele fully intended to continue the business and believed she could do so until the very end,” Charlotte attorney Noell Tin said in an email.
Several complaints show that customers reported paying for kits they had not received long before the company’s closure.
An anonymous 2017 complaint forwarded to the North Carolina Attorney General’s office by the Small Business Administration accused American Log Homes and Cabins of taking “over $20,000 from an elderly person for nothing.” The person was in “deteriorating health” that made it difficult to deal with the loss, the complaint said.
In another case, a Florida woman said in a 2018 complaint that she paid $16,500 for a log cabin kit in December 2015 but had been unable to get in touch with anyone from the company to arrange delivery.
More recent complaints also show the impact the loss of tens of thousands of dollars has had on former customers, several of whom pinned their hopes on the kits once marketed as “dream homes.” Some accuse the company of taking advantage of elderly would-be homeowners.
A Missouri woman said she and her husband lost $16,500 on a cabin they had planned to build after her husband retired from the military. A retired Ohio man said the loss of his $18,000 was “devastating.” He’d already built the foundation for the home when the company shuttered.
“We are a retired couple who were relying on this for our home in Tennessee. We now live here in a camper with our options severely limited because of the actions of this company,” Timothy Barbre wrote in a February complaint. He and his wife responded to a newspaper ad in their local paper and purchased a $16,500 kit in June 2020.
A New Jersey woman wrote to the Attorney General Jeff Jackson’s office in February that her $24,500 log cabin kit was going to be an “escape from her abuser,” as she was “stuck in an abusive marriage.”
Szabo had refused delivery or a refund after issues with preparing the land’s foundation, and suggested the woman sell the kit on Facebook marketplace, she alleged.
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“I told her she did nothing to warrant keeping my money besides sending me the plans. The logs had not even been cut yet,” the woman wrote in her complaint. “I was actually crying on the phone with her but it didn’t seem to bother her.”
The funds were a “large chunk” of the woman’s retirement fund, she said.
The complaints also provided insight into American Log Homes and Cabins’ sales tactics, which multiple attorneys for former customers have characterized as predatory.
The company advertised its kits as discounted estate sale surplus at least as far back as 2015, records from the Attorney General’s office suggest.
In one email exchange with an Arizona woman whose elderly mother had passed away after purchasing a kit, Szabo explains that the woman’s mother, Bonnie Brandt, had paid $17,000 cash for a “balance owed” kit worth $42,450.
“If you sell this kit, that is how much equity a buyer can use towards any of our kits. If they purchase a kit less than $42,450 they will not receive any money or credit back. If they purchase a kit that is more expensive, they would just pay the difference,” Szabo wrote.
Brandt had purchased the kit in 2018, but “despite repeated assurances over time, the product was never delivered,” her daughter, Melissa Miller, wrote in a March 2026 complaint.
A Tennessee man purchased a kit four months before American Log Homes and Cabins shuttered. His attorney said in a Feb. 4 letter to the North Carolina Attorney General’s office that the company’s business practices amount to “at worst, some form of intentional fraud, or at the very least, some intentionally misleading advertising/solicitation of money.”
The lawyer, Terry Abernathy, is the second attorney to petition regulators to investigate the log cabin seller. Durham attorney Garrrett Davis called for criminal charges against Szabo in July.
Abernathy’s client wasn’t aware when he purchased a kit that American Log Homes and Cabins was “little more than a sales desk,” and that a third party cut the logs.
“I think any brief review of American Log Homes’ records will more likely than not show that my client’s money was used for a variety of needs, as opposed to being used for the purchase of the ‘log cabin kit’ from the third-party vendor … This would seem to me to be intentional fraud, somewhat akin to a Ponzi scheme,” Abernathy wrote in the February letter to Jackson’s office and to Mecklenburg County District Attorney General Spencer Merriweather.
The loss of so many customers’ funds wasn’t just a result of a business deal gone bad, Abernathy and Davis have alleged — it was intentional deception on Szabo’s part.
“It would be hard for anyone to believe that if this company was entering into a dissolution process in January, that it did not know when it solicited the funds from my client in September that the business was failing, or had already failed,” Abernathy wrote.
An investigation by Jackson’s Consumer Protection Division is ongoing, a spokesperson confirmed. Such an inquiry can take months or years to complete, and could lead to civil penalties, restitution or injunctions.
The division often partners with law enforcement when criminal activity is suspected.
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