Am I wrong or simply stupid

Am I wrong or simply stupid

by elearning edu -
Number of replies: 1

During the first week of July I got a request from some one to add his name in my Skype.  Subsequently he introduced himself as a moodle developer and came to know about my work on Moodle waitlisting by a search of moodle forum.  He has committed to complete the project by the first of AQugust for a religious organization and he pleadedly persuasively to help him.

I agreed the time line and the fee for the work.  He suggested to me to open a user account in Guru.com and the payment will be made in the escrow account

I engaged the developer who earlier worked on waitlisting feaqture in moodle to modify the code.Every day he came through Skype and I guided him to upgrade his current moodle version to 1.8.2 and set up moodle sites in two of my test servers and demonstrated the working of the program

He further insisted that I have to part with paypal integration and shopping cart code for his use.  Added to this he wanted me to upload his moodle instance in my test server and incorporate the code with his code that he already added to certain files.

When the work was completed, I asked him to send a mail to Guru to say that the work is completed to and the money be released to me. But he kept quite and stopped contacting me.

Next I got a mail from Guru saying that the project was closed by the client with a request to release the money back to him.

Guru further asked me to go for a dispute resolution and later arbitration

I sent Guru the entire trascript of the conversation between me and the developer where he admitted that he is new to moodle.

Now the matter is pending for dispute resolution.  I have his full site perfectly working in my test server.

Every day he is sending a message to me to remove his moodle instance from the test server

This is my first experience

I am in a fix and I wish to know whether I am wrong or simply stupid

Nagarajan

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In reply to elearning edu

Re: Am I wrong or simply stupid

by Chris Lamb -

No, you're not stupid, you've been taken advantage of by an unscrupulous operator.  It happens to us all at some point - I've just won a court judgment against someone for whom I created a (non-Moodle) website but who then declined to pay me.

If his Moodle is on your webserver, and there's traffic coming to it, then I'd modify it by putting a big banner on the front page saying that the person you helped to set it up is refusing to pay you so all his potential customers see that he's a con man.

I don't know how the law works in India, but if he's in the same country as you I'd be inclined to take him to court as well if you can.  You can make life difficult for him, damage his reputation so others will be warned from making the same mistake, and possibly affect his ability to borrow money if he needs to.

To avoid being ripped off in future then rather than waiting till the end of the project and then trying to get the money I'd insist on staged payments, ie you do part of the job, you get part of the money, you do another bit and you get some more, and so on.

HTH

Chris

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