“I’m a freelance web developer. I had a guy contact me saying there was a small project he needed help with, stating it should take minutes and wanted to pay $50. Fair enough. He also states that he needs it done by the end of the day, since he’s apparently in a tight spot with his employer. Also fair enough. I’m not going to turn it down just because it’s a tight deadline. I get in and find out his previous developer was very sloppy, and the code was darn near impossible to read. I tell the client this code is horrible and I need to reformat it. Then it turns out the new links that he wanted to include were completely broken. I told him that it would likely take about six hours to get all of this sorted out, and he said that was fine and would compensate me accordingly by my hourly rate of $80/hr. So I finish everything up, tell him the total of $640, and he agrees, saying he can pay me the next day. This, ‘I’ll pay you the next day,’ mess goes on for about two weeks. I try to call him again on the most recent day that he said he’d pay me. Turns out he’s now blocked my number. A couple days go by of trying to contact him while still getting nothing. I went to log into the site to cut my losses and delete my work. It turns out he’s changed the password. At this point, it’s clear to me this was planned, so I’m heated.
I email him stating that if I don’t hear anything within 48 hours, I’ll be serving him court papers and demand of payment to his address that I had to find through an ancestry site and subsequently call his apartment complex to confirm before I serve some poor sap with random court papers. He doesn’t email for 24 hours, and that same morning I found out that I’m still logged into his site through the platform he was using. I create a new email and become a contributor to his site, which totally causes him to panic. He says he can pay me a fraction of what we initially agreed upon, but I have heard enough. I told him I would keep adding late fees until he finally paid up. He never did. Now his website is live, but every page automatically plays terrible Soundcloud rappers, and all of the links he had me add in take the users to Cool Math Games. I have never done this to any other client, but this dude was a 43 year old piece of garbage, and he really had it coming!”