Joseph approached us with a compelling pitch: we will improve the
copywriting on your site to make it more engaging to your users. We
obtained a quote and were about to move forward when Joseph Chinnock not
only demanded payment upfront, but insisted that we overnight a check
to him. This raised some red flags.
When we explained that we do not pay in advance for services, Joseph
became hostile. When asked for references, none were offered.
Here is an email transcript:
Date:January 25, 2011
12:52:09 PM EST
To: [Anonymous]
Subject:Re: WordSmiths
Proposal
Thanks for wasting
my time you redneck. We were just hired by one of your competitors and
we will make sure to target your bullshit little site.
On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 10:43 AM, Joseph Chinnock
<jcboulder@gmail.com>wrote:
My
writers are indepdent contractors and don't get started until they are
paid half. If I don't pay them then they don't work. Once they get paid
they take it on good faith that they will get paid the other half but
they have gotten burned too. we quoted pretty low to get this done
quickly and also structured it to get it done in two weeks without a
rush fee. It's a $725 check. Is this an issue?
Joseph
On Tue, Jan 25, 2011
at
10:34 AM,[Anonymous] wrote:
Joseph,
I
have to admit I am a bit concerned by the urgency of payment needing to
be made? We have to go through our accounting process. I would say you
would probably not see a check for at least 10-14 business days after we
get the required paperwork. We usually work on net 30 with our
Developers and writers.
Please do not take
this personally, and I am in no way trying to insinuate that your
company would do this, but the last time we saw this type of urgency
from a designer, he tried to stick us for $40K! We eventually recovered
our loss through legal, but we need to cover ourselves. We are not
desperate to get this work done although it would be nice.
Do you have any recent business
references that we can contact?
