Guru.com & Dispute Resolution

If you’ve been following along, I am trying to recover some money that I paid for web design work that I ultimately learned had been stolen from http://www.creative.com by Shayna McCullough under the name of a non-existent company called Iconic Media.

Early on in the process, I went to guru.com which is where the transaction took place, hoping that they had some policies in place to protect me under these circumstances.  I search ed all over the place and couldn’t really find anything, so I eventually ended up scouring their terms of service.  I was disappointed to see how vigorously they position themselves as a provider of payment services.  I guess I understand this in a way since they really don’t have any control over who does what when it comes to actually executing these projects, but it does seem that a basic tenant of their service is to provide some insulation and protection should thing go bad.

I did not get guru involved in this early enough, I guess because I just didn’t think they would offer any help.  I was wrong to have made that assumption, and while this is not yet resolved, I think their actions thus far are commendable and I’d like to thank them for the effort they have already expended.

Within a couple of hours of filing my complaint on their website, I received a fairly lengthy reply that was organized and well thought out.  This wasn’t the kind of template based reply you might expect, but a couple hundred words that dealt specifically with this case and the people involved.  The message described exactly what they would do to try to resolve the matter, and what my options were if they were not successful.  They asked for more information, which I supplied to them, and they followed up again to let me know exactly what they were planning to do.

I have not heard what the outcome of those efforts were yet, but I am really impressed by the sincerity with which they are pursuing this.  I still don’t know if I’ll hire anyone off guru.com again or not, but I do feel a lot better knowing that they do care.

I think the lesson here is that it is always better to try to get someone to help you than to just conclude based on the their legal mumbo jumbo that you are all alone in these kinds of matters.

Business Fraud Alert!

A few months agao, I contracted a “company” that goes by the name “Iconic Media” through http://www.guru.com to design a new site for an eCommerce project of mine which was to be launched at http://www.xambi.com.  A woman named Shayna McCollough was the one and only person from this outfit with whom I have dealt with.  After paying her $2000.00 and investing significant amounts of time in waiting for a design, she finally delivered what I initially believed to be a decent design.  After having a few peers review the design, it was brought to my attention that the design was an exact rip-off of http://www.creative.com.  When approached about this flagrant theft, Ms. McCollough mysteriously disappeared and has not been heard from since.

Please be aware that this work was contracted through Guru.com which portrays itself as a safe intermediary between companies and contractors, yet has done absolutely nothing to help us resolve this situation.

At all costs, please avoid using this company and if you are so inclined, drop Ms. McCollough an email of better yet, a phone call and let her know what you think of her dishonest, if not criminal acts.  Here is all the info I have:

http://www.iconic.cc

Shayna McCollough
smccullough@iconic.cc
Phone: (727) 507-0424
Fax: (310) 388-5747

A whois search turned this up:

Registrant:
   Iconic, Inc.

   468 N. Camden Drive, Suite 200
   Beverly Hills, California 90210
   United States

   Registered through: GoDaddy.com (http://www.godaddy.com)
   Domain Name: ICONIC.CC
      Created on: 26-Oct-03
      Expires on: 26-Oct-05
      Last Updated on: 19-Oct-04

   Administrative Contact:
      Manager, Domain  info@gmi.cc
      Iconic, Inc.
      468 N. Camden Drive, Suite 200
      Beverly Hills, California 90210
      United States
      8882888135      Fax -- 8882888135
   Technical Contact:
      Manager, Domain  info@gmi.cc
      Iconic, Inc.
      468 N. Camden Drive, Suite 200
      Beverly Hills, California 90210
      United States
      8882888135      Fax -- 8882888135

   Domain servers in listed order:
      NS1.IDX.NET
      NS2.IDX.NET

A google search on that address revealed a plethora of businesses using the same address, which would seem to suggest that it is a mail drop of some sort.

A State of California Corporate Search turned this up:

Washing my hands...

So, after all that ruckus with Rob Mensching about COM Advertising from before Christmas, and my sincere gesture to clear the air, it seems that nothing is really resolved after all.

Just before I posted my very nice attempt at clearing the air, I put together a little sample that exactly duplicated the scenario Rob gave me under which COM Advertising had the alleged ‘bugs’ or ‘wonky’ behavior.  Of course, no matter how hard I tried, I could not break COM Advertising or even come close to reproducing the behavior Rob described.  It worked perfectly every time in every scenario I threw at it.  I wanted to clear the air between Rob and I, but wasn’t and never have been willing to concede that there was a bug there unless Rob could tell me what the bug was.  Of course he never did, so I very thoroughly documented my test rig and the scenarios I threw at it, and emailed it to him for him to comment on.  I told him I wanted to clear the air and would be posting an apology to that end, and asked that he either show me the alleged bug(s) or concede (publicly) that there are no bugs in COM Advertising.  It’s been almost three weeks now, and I’ve never heard from him again.  At first, I thought he was working like a mad-man trying to create some bizarre scenario in which it would break, but eventually I concluded that when faced with irrefutable evidence against his position, he just decides he’s too busy to back up his allegations.  This is not the first time, but actually the second time.  The first was over some bogus comments he made about using INSTALLDIR instead of TARGETDIR, but that’s a story for another day…

So, while I wish him and the WiX project well, I am done with him.  He lost my respect through this episode, and in my opinion is a poor reflection on Microsoft’s integrity.

I’ll be working on an update to smoke sometime this week, then be posting the source code for anyone who is interested in using it.