Larry Foster The Plano Programmer Failed a job, make a heap of empty promises, and has stopped communicating since I asked for a refund. Addison, Texas

Hired Larry to do some web programming work. He's an abysmal communicator - started ignoring our phone calls as soon as we paid him his half up front and always used some excuse to send an email instead.

He broke his 1-week deadline and spent the next three weeks making empty promises. Never once contacted us proactively about the deadlines he was missing. We never saw any evidence that he even started the program except an XML dump that I could have gotten myself with five minutes of work.

When pressed repeatedly he sent us a cursory description of the problem he was having, which our vendor's tech contact said was an easy fix. He never fixed it, gave up after a month, and despite being up-front about potentially refunding our money, he started ignoring my emails as soon as he gave up.

Maybe he's going to send us a check and is only guilty of failure to communicate, but considering his poor record with us and the ripoff reports about him refusing refunds, we're not giving him the benefit of the doubt. We're prepared to resolve this in court if necessary.

At best, he:
-Screens his clients' phone calls
-Sends nothing but one-sentence emails with empty promises of a solution "today" unless repeatedly harassed
-Gives no indication that he realizes that turning a 1-week project into a 1-month project without so much as showing us a test version on a server somewhere (which was repeatedly promised but never delivered) is unacceptable
-Stops responding to emails when he finally gives up on the project and it's time to give us a refund.

Unfortunately our company already lost three weeks of time to this guy that we won't be getting back.