Brian Bell (President of Links Publications Incorporated)
hired me to perform some data recovery on a server that went down at his
facility. The servers were managed by
GoDaddy and Brian was told by GoDaddy that the data he had hosted on his
original HDD was lost. Brian asked me to
review the contents of the old HDD and port any data that I could find to his
new environment, which I did. Once the
data was restored to the new environment, Brian needed assistance reading the
configuration files and updating the information within his Plesk console. I converted all of the configuration files
into plain text files exported them off the server and mailed them to
Brian. Once this was complete, Brian was
having issues with email accounts and noticed that some of the configured
accounts were not rebuilt on the system; it was at this point things started
getting sticky. I have performed all of
the above tasks to his liking and requested payment for the work, he said he
setup my account within Citizen's Bank and they would cut the check and the
check never came. I informed Brian that
I could not perform any additional work until payment was received and he
informed me I would have to talk to his lawyer (also his wife) Rakel Meir. He will not give me any contact for his
lawyer accept for a mailing address that he used when I sent him the data
backup I created on DVD of his environment.
Since this fiasco stated with failure to pay, I have
continued to mail and email a copy of the invoice to Brian Bell every Friday. He is now claiming there is a criminal
investigation against me for harassment, I called my police department and they
informed me it was a civil complaint and they won't investigate. Brian then claimed I hacked into his server,
deleted services, and posted his usernames and passwords on craigslist along
with calling his voicemail stating "my name" and saying that I am
with the sheriff's department and that the calls were transcribed by the police
department. I proceeded to call my
police department (with apologizes for bothering them) and inquired about such
investigation and low and behold my police department did receive a call from
Brian Bell of North Andover, MA but the story that Brian gave had to many holes
and it still was considered a civil matter, so they will not persue it.
I know my only way to resolve this issue is a civil case
through small claims court, but what else can I do to protect others from this
individual?