Nicholas Johnson Utah / Nick Johnson Utah review: Fraud / Forgery / Theft / Drugs / Felon 1

Street Crime Doesn’t Pay
The Utah Telephone Fraud Prevention Act of 1993 specifically restricts prison inmates from telephone solicitation. However, at least one Utah OBO coaching company had no qualms about hiring workers with criminal backgrounds—especially since the owners themselves had such backgrounds. Nic Johnson and Jeff Nielson, principals behind the company JNJ Consulting, each have criminal records.
In 2010, Consumer Protection temporarily revoked JNJ’s license since the company application stated that none of its owners, managers or key employees had criminal records. Johnson was charged with burglary in 2003. In a February 2003 probable-cause statement, a Midvale City Police detective wrote that a resident came home to find a truck parked in her driveway. When she went in, she found she had been robbed of jewelry, power tools and a computer. Johnson was spotted leaving the scene and quickly apprehended by police. Johnson avoided trial, pleaded guilty and completed probation in 2006. The felony-burglary charge was reduced to a misdemeanor in 2007.
Jeff Nielson, who would later become Johnson’s partner in JNJ, has a more checkered history. Between 2004 and 2005, Nielson faced 32 criminal charges, including felony and misdemeanor charges from crimes committed in Fillmore, Provo and Salt Lake City. The allegations ranged from forging an $80, 000 check to snatching the purse of a woman loading groceries into her car at a West Jordan Smith’s. Nielson was found guilty on 10 felony charges in 2005. He avoided trial by entering court-ordered drug treatment and paying restitution to victims. By 2006, he had completed probation on all charges.
Both men rehabilitated and moved on with their lives … into the OBO industry.

The men only got in trouble in 2009 when Consumer Protection found their histories left off their telemarketing application.
Despite repeated attempts, City Weekly was unable to contact Nielson and Johnson for this story. But according to a Consumer Protection administrative finding of fact from April 2010, Johnson asserted that not disclosing his criminal past “was not intentional” because he believed only felony convictions had to be disclosed and his burglary charge had been reduced to a misdemeanor. Consumer Protection also recognized that Nielson’s criminal background wasn’t an issue because “Nielson was not an employee of JNJ at the time Johnson completed and submitted the application.”
When JNJ faced losing its telemarketing permit in 2010, after a hearing with Consumer Protection, the company was simply required to pay a higher bond than usual and was allowed to continue operating.
Crawford Lindsay, an employee and former manager who worked for Johnson and Nielson from 2007 to 2009, describes the pair as Ultimate Fighting nuts, sporting gelled hair and rocking house music at the office. “They were more or less real Jersey Shore types, ” Lindsay says.
Lindsay says he didn’t fully understand the nature of the industry until he got into management position and began hearing what he described as a high volume of customer complaints and requests for refunds. The real crime, Lindsay believes, was the product they sold customers on.
“These guys were selling ### in a box, ” Lindsay says of the coaching packages they sold for various coaching companies. “I’m just as guilty, but I was told by the owners that [our customers] were being taken care of. It took me a while to realize, ‘Wow, I’ve probably sold millions of dollars worth of ### in a box, and I can’t ask one [customer] to show us how your business is going, ’ ” he says.
Beyond that, Lindsay says, Nielson and Johnson ran no background checks on employees. One employee, Lindsay says, was hired right out of prison.