Tales of two Entrepreneurs


Archive for the ‘Scum of Society’ Category

Rick Yang - Dhileads the biggest crook of our time

Saturday, September 22nd, 2007

We have been in business since last 4 years and have come across lot many good people and a few crooked people. However the experience that we had with Rick Yang, the owner of Dhileads.com, also popularly known as Gonka and goes with AIM screen name of gonka2002 has been indeed a nightmare.

Rick Yang

We were generating debt relief leads for Rick Yang and while dealing with him for a few days, we realized he is a crook, but unfortunately by then it was just too late. We realized that along with screwing us on our money, he was screwing his clients as well by selling an exclusive lead multiple times. Anyway, after a few weeks on payday when we started receiving partial payment, we realized he is a scum of society, but he owed us money and we wanted a way out. Ultimately over 10 K was due upon him, out of which he finally agreed to pay 3 K on excuse of client not paying him rest of the money. After lot many repeated warnings, he finally confirmed that he wired the money to our bank account. We waited and waited and no sign of money. Barry smelled a fraud and he gave Rick a good tongue lashing. I still maintained my cools and continued negotiating with him. He gave lot many excuses, the final of the excuse was his wife wired the money and there is some problem with his bank account at Hong Kong. IRS are you listening, an ex convict maintaining and operating an offshore account to handle his US business.
So his wife went to Hong Kong to clear issues with their offshore account. Another one month passed. Multiple times he promised sending the money and it was never sent. Sure we had come across clients who said they will not pay us our money due to X reason, but this scum always kept on lying and lying. Finally after 3 months of lying he blocked our IM and stopped responding.
What next: I was of the opinion to report him to authorities and even report to IRS and DOJ about his secret bank account. He is an ex convict anyway. But Barry doesn’t think he deserves a punishment that harsh. To me, if he is hanged it will be a lesser punishment for this scum. His lies have costed jobs of many employees, who were bread and butter earners of their families.

For now, all our ex employees have formed a group and daily they create new screen names at AOL. They daily send good morning ahole messages to him and the coward that he is, he couldn’t respond to it and locks them. It has been continued since last 1 month. Now our ex employees are planning to launch a call center attack against the scammer, by renting a call center for whole night and calling this scum for whole day abusing him and asking him to pay our money. I know for sure the thick alligator skin Rick has, he won’t respond to any of these attacks as he is a crooked fellow. In any place around the world, scum like these should be put in a solitary prison so that they should not be able to talk to killers and rapists in prison and mould them to more heinous crime as he is doing.
Rick I know you are such an idiot that you will read this blog and block it so that noone in your family can read it. Hopefully one day some one will kill you in the street’s and the world will be a better place to live without you.

Nitin Tripathi

It “IS” better to give then receive, Indeed…..

Sunday, September 2nd, 2007

Last night while my son (16) awaited his bus, two young men rolled up on him and demanded his cell phone. By it being so close to midnight that there was no other people in sight, he did just what i told him to do if ever in that type of spot, he gave up the phone.

 As soon as the young men left with his phone, my son ran to the nearest place for help and GOT IT! One of the young men was caught a few minutes later and the other will soon follow as they have the first one and the cops indicated that he told on his partner.

 so in closing, my son had to “give” up his phone (by the way, who knows it they were armed or what) but now those 2 young men will likely “receive” there first strike under the California 3 strike law and they will have to do %85 of whatever time they get. Yes its true, its truly better to “give” then “receive”…….

Barry.

Elance and some more painful clients

Sunday, August 19th, 2007

This week, I decided to run an experiment. Even though in principal I am against all freelance sites, I joined ELance.com as service provider and tried to bid for a few project. There was a project to build a clone of youtube with adding a few new functionalities. I tried to bid for it and sure enough asked a few questions to client before giving a fair bid. The client declined my bid, because he was not interested in wasting his time in chatting to service providers. All he was interested was in a site that will give a tough competition to youtube and he wanted to get it done in less than 1000 USD, without spending any minute of his precious time to discuss about the project. Lol he is a perfect candidate to be ripped off by a freelancer who will take away his 1000$ and will send him a dummy script being used by hundreds for free.

 

Then there was another client who wanted 40 very high quality PR2+ in-coming links. He had one full page of requirement about the quality of links (essentially excluding all ways through which you can get links. If at all you get a link as per the criteria of the client, that link will be available at google.com main home page only). Anyway being in link business I knew immediately that it will take 2 linkers to spend 20 days in getting these links. I made a bid of 600 USD with 50% in advance. With this deal I would have ended up may be losing a few dollars, but in order to compete with other bids, I also have to bid in the same range of others.  I got a response from buyer next day, asking that he will pay $4 per link and the max he WILL pay is 240 USD. With 240 USD, we cant even pay the expenses of one linker for the whole month. Anyway just for the fun of it, I asked any other requirement. Indeed there was. No money till the client receives all 40 confirmed links and the links have to be there on the page for at least 2 months before he pays a single penny. Lol what a nice proposition. You get a project in which if you do good job sure you will end up losing good money in terms of salary expenses, you pay the money as commission to elance for winning the project, you pay the money to elance for monthly fee, you bear the whims of this dumb buyer who doesn’t understand the value of quality  work and if you do everything nicely after 3 months, you will be lucky enough to get a grand 240 USD. I had enough of it. Enuf experimentation, back to some work.

 

My overall observation of this whole episode is A) At freelance site, many of the clients really don’t care about the quality of the work B) The ultimate objective for these clients is get services done and not pay a penny for the services. Sure it is not possible in US, so they turn to freelance sites and try to screw third world programmers. C) Programmers on their part know very well the intent of these clients. However they generalize the definition of the client and they treat 100% clients in same way. As soon as a project comes they will bid on it @ 1 USD per hour just to get the project.  D) Programmers underbid and once selected for the project either never finish the project or get the money and simply run away or keep on asking for more and more money.  If at all they finish a job on freelance site, ultimately client ends up paying 3-4 times extra than what was bided before.

 

The ultimate conclusion for all the people is you get what you pay for. If you want to outsource your job, maximum you can save is 50%-60% Don’t try to save 99% Ultimately there is nothing like Free Lunch. Also ultimately it is your project. You recruited programmers to do a job for you, so you need to spend a bit time with them, monitor them and make sure you are getting what you paid for.

 

Nitin.

This weeks top pain in the A$$ clients we rejected……..

Saturday, August 18th, 2007

Lets start with rejected client Cindy from mid-city America. Cindy (which is not her real name) had a project that she has been shopping around now for atleast 2 weeks and now needs it done over the next 48 hours. We look at her project and it is indeed very doable in 2 days BUT, her attitude was so bad on the phone when I spoke with her that we chose to either charge her are special A$$-hole rate or pass on her biz so i shot her a email with are rate and she called all huffing and puffing and demanded the another rate we said we charge. I told her “for you” we only have this special rate and take it or leave it, she left it and good ridden’s.

Then there is Jerry (which is not his real name) from small-city America. In responding to a email I sent him, good’ol Jerry thought it would be nice to let me know how poorly done my pitch email was and that he might have been ready to do some biz if only I had worded my email better. Jerry was also kind enough as to leave his companies website and his personal contact info in this email:). Now armed with this info, I went right to work. The first place I stopped was his website and boy was that a mess. I am talking FRAMES in alot of pages, title’s that had the same thing on them through-out the whole site, many pages in PDF form, not more then a handful of links and a Alexa rating in the millions:). I pointed all this out to Jerry and told him that as he is a founder and high ranking officer at this company that he should be ashamed of himself for not having a better online presence. Needless to say we didn’t strike up any deals:)………..

How was Your week, any clients from hell?

 Barry.