Jodie Trousdell - On My Feet - Homeless Charity in Australia Scammed for training and support software Australia

Our organisation "On My Feet" assists the homeless to transition from shelters to self-sufficiency through education and employment. We have a team of over 100 volunteers who deliver over 45,000 hours to the Australian community annually in homeless assistance programs. Since COVID our team has substantially grown in size along with a constant increase in demand on our services from the community. We decided that incorporating an online styled training module would best assist our growing volunteer team so we placed an advertisement via the LinkedIn network.

The aforementioned respondent [Jodie Trousdell] reached out in response to our ad and provided a fantastic resume of past experience in developing training programs. After some further correspondence we organised a meeting over Teams with her as our organisation is based in Western Australia and she in Queensland. From the meeting we were astounded by the achievements Jodie could articulate and she had shown an astute background in professional development. After some further discussions with Jodie our charity agreed to contracting her for the development and delivery of a training program to onboard new volunteers. Jodie agreed that the modules would be delivered with no additional on-cost and that any expenses incurred would be first discussed with our charity before being agreed. In the proceeding weeks Jodie would provide amazing examples of the modules she had developed and would not make any mention of additional pricing or costs, it was only once the development progressed to testing did the cost creep began. 

Firstly Jodie requested that the trial software only be run on a specific web server that we felt had a high operating cost and after some back and forth we eventually agreed to pay her directly. About a week passed by and Jodie reached out to us again explaining that the trial was ready to be reviewed online. She provided us login and password details for the training system however the web address she provided did not resolve. When we contacted Jodie over Teams about the login not working she said she would look into the situation right away and come back to us. Not a day after that discussion Jodie came back to us explaining that the webserver requirements for the training system required an upgraded query database and that this would come at an additional cost. Our organisation was hesitant to pay the additional costs however Jodie was persistent in pointing out that the training module was ready to be tested. 

After paying the second installment we were immediately unable to contact Jodie again and she has since blocked all our attempts to reach out to her. We are unsure if the training system was ever developed and are fairly certain that no web service provider received any money to host the software. This heartless act of actively coercing money from our organisation has come at a great cost to the people we try and help every day.