Please note: the money I lost was part of my Kickstarter grant. I am replacing it with my own.

It was so simple, really… I walked right into the con of my own volition. See, I put up an ad on Craigslist, hoping to find a developer to build my very simple Here & Now website and phone app. I immediately got several responses, and started weeding through them. One in particular stood out, a bid for $2500 from a guy in Boise: he promised to also include 3 months of free maintenance. Eventually, I emailed each of the finalists, and this Boise guy (named Evan Schroeder) responded warmly. He sent along some great work examples, he said all the right stuff from a technical point of view when we spoke on the phone… I’d found my guy!

He asked for half the money up front, at the time we signed the contract. I didn’t think twice about it–I usually ask for that with new clients for freelance work. So I anted up, signed the virtual contract, and sent him my files. He wanted to start immediately, promising delivery in little over a week. He also talked about his crew, as if there were more than one person working for him. I didn’t buy that from the start, figuring he was a hungry lone freelancer looking for some portfolio work. The price was lower than the Brooklyn quotes because it was Boise, they didn’t have the rents we had. All was good, or so I thought.

The first weird thing to happen was he never sent this all-important client questionnaire that he kept talking about. I didn’t really care, since I had worked out as much of the functionality and look and feel as possible. But it was odd that Evan could never manage to get that to me. Then there was a big silence for a few days. I started emailing and texting regularly, starting to worry about the amount of time that had passed. He finally resurfaced, claiming to have had emergency surgery that had taken him out of commission.

Then , the excuses began. Evan said he was sending emails to a non-existant email address. Then, his sleep pattern was still off from being ill. He promised a couple of times to have the code all uploaded within 48 hours, which never happened.

Finally, I realized the gig was up. It had been three weeks and I had not gotten so much as a screen shot. I looked up the company name he’s working under and lo and behold, I found it on the Ripoff Report. This guy has been ripping people off all over Boise. I must be one of his first interstate patsies. I did some research on the work he had sent to me as proof of his expertise and come to find out, the studio for which he had claimed to work had never heard of him, or at least not his assumed name. They did know this other fellow, however, from a shady dealing four years ago. I was officially screwed.

Anyway, he kept responding, saying he was sending the files any minute, they were on Dropbox, blah, blah, blah. Lies, all lies. It was as if he was getting off a little on the whole exchange. Maybe impotent rage turns him on, I don’t know. He also seemed to think I wouldn’t notice the fact that I had received nothing from him whatsoever.

The thing is, I got taken because I made the assumption that this guy was honest. I moved forward based on that assumption and got fried for it. This walking pant-load expects me to be too embarrassed to tell anyone, but I’m not. I operated in a trusting way when I should have been more cautious, so what? That’s not worth $1250, that’s for damn sure. Of course now I see I was too willing to believe what I had been told. Lesson learned, but this chump still has my money. I don’t care that I have mentioned him by name–it’s an assumed name anyway. Hell, here’s his phone number: 208.830.5694. You can’t sue for libel if what I say is true, so have at it, by all means.

I will try again with a new developer, this time a little poorer and a little wiser. My project is now at least a month off schedule. I feel bad that this happened, but once again, not bad enough to not talk about it. To hell with that—I want everyone to know about this little, little, thieving man. If you live in Boise and come across a young turk saying he works for this company, reach across the table and give him a nice, stiff pop in the mouth for me. And make sure all the drinks are on his tab. After all, they’re actually on me.