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Review 2/4/2010
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Charles Winters contracted to build two websites for me. He told me it would take 5 days. Two weeks after starting he told me the first site was 50% complete, and therefore he needed his second (of 3) payments. I questioned the work, he responded that he had completed the background programming and that the site was essentially complete. Trustingly I paid the second payment. He then told me that the server on which my site was hosted had problems, so he needed to move the site to his own servers. This “issue” led to 2 more weeks of delay.
He called me desperate for money, requesting 50% of the final balance to be paid early. His phone was about to be disconnected and if I did not give him the money, he wouldn’t be able to be in contact and therefore could not finish the job. It was either $200 immediately or no websites. I foolishly gave him the money. He then began “working” on my second site. He took the existing site offline, and proceeded to lose all the data. He blamed this on a second server company crashing before he could back up any data. (Funny – it had been working perfectly for a year before he accessed it).
Every day for 4 weeks he told me the next day my sites would be complete. Each promise was a lie, met by excuses about his car, his roommate, ex wife, child, traffic court, and whatever reason he could conjure up that day. I finally demanded to be reimbursed. A 5 day agreement had turned into 6 weeks. My original functional site I had given him to improve, was gone without backup, and the complete site to be built was not complete and certainly not functional. He refused reimbursement saying that he had done the work, nothing was his fault as the servers were at fault, and he believed he had done the work (whether or not the sites existed). I threatened to sue him, his response was to threaten to destroy any site I ever built in the future, he would destroy the materials I gave him, and unless I signed a release saying that all work had been completed satisfactorily, I would “be sorry”.
Charles Winters is a pathological liar and incompetent at website construction. In one 8 hour marathon work session, he managed to add one jpeg to a website. I do not believe he ever intended to do any work. He has caused me 6 weeks of unrelenting stress for a job that was supposed to take 5 days, he took my money, my books of photo’s to be used for the sites are probably gone, and after all this time, I need to start again with someone new. I do not recall a more unpleasant transactional experience.
Grant Arthur Gochin
Honorary Consul
Republic of Togo
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