[Rant] Why to always use contracts
Posted: Fri Jan 06, 2006 3:24 am
I'm sure there are several of users among these forums that have been ripped off, and for those of you that have surely have learned the same lesson I have.
A couple months ago I was "contracted" to design a credit card gateway to tie in transactions with a couple bank accounts. Now I've heard all kinds of horror stories about people getting ripped off, or contractors disapeering or whatever, so I always made note to be extra careful to make sure there was some form of written consent of what money was involved, and other terms involved in contracts. Now my contractor didn't deal with programmers from Canada, which is where I am located so he was unfamiliar with the specifics of Canadian Law's and such, so he told me it would take a little while to write up a contract. Yet, this contract never came, even after multiple requests of it over several weeks. I was getting furthur and furthur into development and the checks were coming in.. so I thought no biggie. Everything was going smooth and the money was flowing, up until a day where I was nearly finishing the final stages of development where the alleged contractor of mine ran out of funding, even though he stilled owed me for some more hours of work. Not a big deal at the time, because new financing was coming in the following month.
So now I'm sitting here for a couple weeks (I havn't really been in contact with this company), and I finally got in touch with another person I was working with, who claimed he was owned a couple thousand as well. To make a long story short, it was found out that this guy was using a relatively elaborate scheme to skim money off the top, and essentially steal from the people financing. It was found out and confirmed that this guy has stolen over $150,000 dollars
.
The good news is, I have all his contact information, his home address (he lives in the same town as most of my friends -- perhaps a visit is due) , and a list of people who have been ripped off.
The bad news is, there is nothing legal I can do to get my money back, because no contract was ever signed.
The moral of the story, always have a signed contract before you write one line of code.
A couple months ago I was "contracted" to design a credit card gateway to tie in transactions with a couple bank accounts. Now I've heard all kinds of horror stories about people getting ripped off, or contractors disapeering or whatever, so I always made note to be extra careful to make sure there was some form of written consent of what money was involved, and other terms involved in contracts. Now my contractor didn't deal with programmers from Canada, which is where I am located so he was unfamiliar with the specifics of Canadian Law's and such, so he told me it would take a little while to write up a contract. Yet, this contract never came, even after multiple requests of it over several weeks. I was getting furthur and furthur into development and the checks were coming in.. so I thought no biggie. Everything was going smooth and the money was flowing, up until a day where I was nearly finishing the final stages of development where the alleged contractor of mine ran out of funding, even though he stilled owed me for some more hours of work. Not a big deal at the time, because new financing was coming in the following month.
So now I'm sitting here for a couple weeks (I havn't really been in contact with this company), and I finally got in touch with another person I was working with, who claimed he was owned a couple thousand as well. To make a long story short, it was found out that this guy was using a relatively elaborate scheme to skim money off the top, and essentially steal from the people financing. It was found out and confirmed that this guy has stolen over $150,000 dollars
The good news is, I have all his contact information, his home address (he lives in the same town as most of my friends -- perhaps a visit is due) , and a list of people who have been ripped off.
The bad news is, there is nothing legal I can do to get my money back, because no contract was ever signed.
The moral of the story, always have a signed contract before you write one line of code.
