EightMedia Rip Off Scam

Posted on 23rd August 2009

A few months back I started to investigate the possibility of doing some freelance work. You know small items like coding a wordpress theme, skinning a psd for vbulletin etc etc. Since I live in the UK I quickly found a great website which offered short term, quick freelancing tasks and more appropriately I found tasks which were perfectly aligned with what I do on a daily basis.

The site in question was freelancers.net, sure it’s not a pretty site but it’s free, active and project owners respond pretty quickly.

EightMedia

Anyway I started working with an Irish guy who went by the name of Chris and owned a small print and design agency by the name of eightmedia. A really nice guy on the face of it and extremely flexible at first. The projects were simple PSD to XHTML coding tasks for wordpress. I’m pretty much an expert when it comes to Wordpress coding so I thought I’d give it a shot.

So what happened, first project no problems, paid on time via paypal, second project no payment because his paypal account got suspended. I was quite compassionate towards his situation as I too knew of the delays and problems a suspended paypal account brought. So despite this I carried onto the next project and decided to collect payment for project 2 and 3 in one go. I trusted the guy, it’s as simple as that.

Wire Transfer Saga

A few weeks later he asked me for my bank details so he could wire the funds to me due to having no luck with his paypal account. No problem I said, certainly a wire transfer was something that I was more than comfortable with.

Unfortunately neither the wire transfer nor the responses to the emails I sent him after that were ever received. (4 months now and still waiting for the promised payment.)

Clever Rip Off Tactics ?

The guy walked, with no intention of ever paying up. In fact just before I stood my ground asking for him to check up on the wire transfer he even tried to get another project out of me. Was this a cheap tactic of paying for one project and the getting 3-4 more out for FREE ? I really don’t know but it pissed me off so much that I no longer feel like collecting payment on delivery. It’s hard to trust anyone on the net and despite this experience I still deal in extremely large sums of money when it comes to buying and selling online.

I guess this post is just me venting and warning others about this guy but more importantly a reminder that doing business online requires careful thought and the ability to accept that you’ll be ripped off from time to time. All the protection and experiencce you get doesn’t mean you won’t get ripped off as I experienced with good old Chris.