Avoid scammers

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keynon
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Avoid scammers

Post by keynon »

About 4 months ago I sought out a programmer to develop a social networking website. I had never dealt with a company in India but had heard that it would save me money by outsourcing to India. I searched for companies in India that claimed to have experienced PHP developers. I found a company in Google called India Nic. My first contact with them was with their sales person. After a few days, I was then introduced to a project manager. The project manager then passed me on to my dedicated project manager, then passed off again to the actual programmer. It seemed great that I had about 5 guys assisting me on my website. But what I didn't realize until it was too late was that it was all a bunch of fluff. I started the project off buy purchasing an open source code program called D zoic. India Nic looked over the code and said that my requirements would take about 3 weeks to a month to complete. The changes involved adding a text message feature to send out a text message to a users via the email address format provided by the cell provider. It was the same confirmation already built into the D Zoic program. So it didn't involve much other than duplicating the existing code. The second requirement was to create a survey in the program that would allow users to survey other users. I provided them the open source survey software that would need to be integrated into the system. There were some other mild requirements but those two were the bulk of the work. An entire month went by and only the cell phone confirmation was completed and a few mild requirements I had. I had already given a deposit for $1,000.00 based on the idea that the rest of the project would be completed and I'd give them the second half for a total of $2,000.00 for the work. But at the end of the month, they were asking for me to pay the additional $1,000.00 and give them more. I paid them the second $1,000.00 and then waited to see more progress. The second month they integrated the survey but did it wrong. They botched the concept of the website and took a direction that was easier than what I had asked for. Without the correct result, the website was useless. On the beginning of the 3rd month I asked them to stop working on it. I had realized on the 3rd month when they were asking for more money that they were churning me. I then had a developer look at the progress of what they had done and it became clear that the work they had done would've taken any other developer a couple days to do. They had billed me for over 260 hours and done about a couple days work. I put a stop to the project after I had tested the website for bugs. There were several page crashes and the functions I had paid for didn't work. I immediately started the project over with another developer in Paris. My new programmer Nick nearly finished my requirements in 3 days. On top of the requirements I gave to India Nic, my new programmer Nick actually did twice the work and also billed me for less. He also got me in touch with another customer of India Nic who had experienced the same thing. She was less fortunate. She had already given India Nic $10,000.00 and they were still asking for more. I looked at her website and it had the same problems as mine. It was botched.

If you know of anyone using India Nic as their programmer, I'd immediately tell them to stop now. They bill you for hours that aren't real and keep asking for more money. I got the feeling that there was not going to be an end to the project. It seemed like a bottomless pit.

Thanks,

Ken
Last edited by onion2k on Wed Aug 27, 2008 10:42 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Removed inflammatory reference to a country from the title.
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onion2k
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Re: Avoid scammers in India

Post by onion2k »

Your experience could be true of a company anywhere. When you commission some software to be written you should research the company you're planning to deal with, talk to their previous clients, look at the work they've produced in the past, etc - that's true if the company is in India, America, the UK, anywhere.
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volomike
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Re: Avoid scammers

Post by volomike »

Unless you build trust with a developer, anything over $2K USD in payments requires, in my view, some proof that the work is being done. And if it doesn't look like it, inquire about it and express your conflict with it. And if you don't see help and, instead, get asked for another $1K USD (like you did) before they provide proof that your first $2K was sufficient, then say no, stop work, and bail on them. Now, your project might legitimately require $10K or $20K in the future -- but what I'm saying is that with each $2K USD of that, inquire to find some kind of proof that this is working out. And when they pull off a project well for you, you can stop doing that and just start to trust them a little, such as checking on them every $5K USD or $6K USD.
matthijs
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Re: Avoid scammers

Post by matthijs »

I'm very sorry to hear your story. Wish you more succes with your new developer.

Is it common practice to pay up front by the way? I can understand a small amount. But after that I would suppose the developer would first do the work and only get paid after that - when you're satisfied with the progress?
malcolmboston
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Re: Avoid scammers

Post by malcolmboston »

without wanting to have any racist overtones to my post.....

The fact of the matter is in my experience its pretty common knowledge that most of the indian programming workforce ive heard about are exactly the same, i remember a few years back when i had to actually go out and find work on sites such as scriptlance, codercc etc you would get bid on a project at a pretty cheap price of say £300 just to get the work to add to your portfolio and a bit of beer money and there would be bids from indian 'companies' (i use that word extremely loosely) willing to do it for £50, it was insane, i wouldnt waste my time with that.

I'd guess that all 5 people you dealt with was the same person and i would not of allowed them to use open source projects, full-stop, if your integrating so many different systems into one there's all sorts that can go wrong and from what you say you were asking for (survey, emailing / sms service) would take me probably the same as your current developer and does not warrant a month's work, that would of been the first warning sign.

To be honest, you only have yourself to blame on this one, i would never dream of outsourcing work to India, they are cheap for a reason, there work is usually poor and in my case if that happened, my clients would not be happy and my reputation would be tarnished.

My $0.02
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onion2k
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Re: Avoid scammers

Post by onion2k »

There are some very good outsourcing companies in India. They just don't tend to write small apps. The one's who do write small web apps can be unreliable - just as companies that write small web apps in any other country can be unreliable. Trust me, if this was a thread about bad PHP dev companies in the UK it'd be just as easy to find people with examples of how they've been ripped off. It is not a nationality thing.
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jayshields
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Re: Avoid scammers

Post by jayshields »

If you're paying any money up front I would set up some sort of system where you could monitor progress whenever you wanted. The only couple of times I've been paid upfront to do something for someone I don't actually know in person I have developed it all on a public server so the client could just go to URL whenever he/she wanted and see what's changed since last time they looked.

If this is infeasible (say, you're developing a huge algorithm where it isn't done until it's done), then I would try and familiarise the client with some sort of physical code tracking system (I don't really use these things but from what I gather sub version is a popular one) so they can just see what changes have been made to the files and on what dates.
josh
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Re: Avoid scammers

Post by josh »

I think its mainly a communication thing, you can only convey so much verbally. Also, if you are going to use a "tele-commuter" its probably best to find one in your country, or state atleast for legal reasons, and enter written contracts. My grandpa always used to say "don't carry around more cash then you can afford to loose". Same goes for lending out debt.
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