What are his initials to his name? This sounds all to familiar, is the correct area etc.
I was burned for 20K. The man was a professional bad debtor.
He built a relationship with me for 6 months, having me do work that he initially paid for in cash or check, which always worked fine. Over time, the jobs got larger, and more costly, and we moved to 30 day terms. I never bothered with a credit check because he built a relationship that started on pre-pay cash.
His last job was to hit me with the 20K job. Bad check and it was all over. What really sucked about this job was it was not all labor, and I had employees do the labor which also cost me. My cost of goods on this job was 75% of the total, which I had to pay to my vendors.
I sued him in small claims for the max amount in my state. I sued him two times by breaking the job into two invoices so I could try to approach the total amount owed. Merely serving him took weeks and required I hire a pretty ruthless process server. He was good at hiding out. I received judgement and won the case.
He never paid. I sent him to a collection agency who called me back in a day to tell me they knew of him well. There was and is no way to collect.
His son has the same name as him, which is part of his scam. He is "married" or at least with the same woman for decades. All assets are in her name, but since they are not married there are no mutual assets to have liened or seized.
The only thing I could have done different, perhaps with more research, would be to have a sheriff on the courthouse to take his car on the spot. That may not be possible, and really depends on the circumstances.
In the end, the only thing I was able to do was harass him on the phone and dig through the work I had done, locating the people he resold my work to and warn them to cancel all payments. Once of his clients was nice enough to hold payment back for a time and give it to me as long as there were no legal repercussions coming from the scammer.
His initials are T.W. in case it is the same person. I still hold judgement to him this day. If he ever opens a bank, buys a house, gets a credit card, or does anything that can be attached as far as funds, I will get in a line and maybe get paid after all the others are paid in the order in which he screwed them.
This will end up being a lesson learned. Sorry to hear about this for you.
I'm working to build a site exposing him and will post here. Hopefully a few HNers will blog about it and help other web devs/designers stay away from him.
This guy is such a scumbag he subcontracts out the work and I know for a fact the original client paid him the money. He doesn't want to pay me a fraction of what he probably got paid.
Let's see. The original client is using your copyrighted work, and you never got paid?
Check with a lawyer. If you didn't get paid, he may well not have any right to use your copyrighted work. Therefore he has no ability to sell the right to your work to the original client. If so, then the original client is now in violation of your copyright.
If so then the fact that you are in a position to cause trouble for the original client might accomplish something useful. But think carefully about how to use it in negotiation before going there. (On the plus side you may poison that original client against that person. On the negative side, you're unlikely to recover much after legal expenses.)
I was burned for 20K. The man was a professional bad debtor.
He built a relationship with me for 6 months, having me do work that he initially paid for in cash or check, which always worked fine. Over time, the jobs got larger, and more costly, and we moved to 30 day terms. I never bothered with a credit check because he built a relationship that started on pre-pay cash.
His last job was to hit me with the 20K job. Bad check and it was all over. What really sucked about this job was it was not all labor, and I had employees do the labor which also cost me. My cost of goods on this job was 75% of the total, which I had to pay to my vendors.
I sued him in small claims for the max amount in my state. I sued him two times by breaking the job into two invoices so I could try to approach the total amount owed. Merely serving him took weeks and required I hire a pretty ruthless process server. He was good at hiding out. I received judgement and won the case.
He never paid. I sent him to a collection agency who called me back in a day to tell me they knew of him well. There was and is no way to collect.
His son has the same name as him, which is part of his scam. He is "married" or at least with the same woman for decades. All assets are in her name, but since they are not married there are no mutual assets to have liened or seized.
The only thing I could have done different, perhaps with more research, would be to have a sheriff on the courthouse to take his car on the spot. That may not be possible, and really depends on the circumstances.
In the end, the only thing I was able to do was harass him on the phone and dig through the work I had done, locating the people he resold my work to and warn them to cancel all payments. Once of his clients was nice enough to hold payment back for a time and give it to me as long as there were no legal repercussions coming from the scammer.
His initials are T.W. in case it is the same person. I still hold judgement to him this day. If he ever opens a bank, buys a house, gets a credit card, or does anything that can be attached as far as funds, I will get in a line and maybe get paid after all the others are paid in the order in which he screwed them.
This will end up being a lesson learned. Sorry to hear about this for you.