This whole ordeal reminds me of a gentleman I spoke to a few years ago about exhasut headers for my car.
The guy was a very kind, very fair, very reasonable, and very friendly older gentleman. It also turned out that he was the only game in town, or the country for that matter, who made headers for this specific engine. There were lots of people interested in them, and lots of people who were waiting for them since they had sent their money in advance.
I spoke to the guy, and in our conversation he had mentioned that he was a little behind, but was working on a new design. He asked me for pictures and measurements, and I put up a web page so that he could access everything...with drawings, pictures and details. He was going to send me a preliminary set to test fit, and I'd send it back and he'd have his jig set up.
After about a year of him hemming and hawing, nothing happened and he basically told everyone that he wasn't getting any help from anyone on the new design. What?!? I was very helpful, what was he talking about? I was going to be his west coast distributor and he was going to send me 20 sets to sell. I was also still, after 1.5 years, waiting for my original headers to be sent out COD, and they still hadn't been shipped. I learned from others with the same engine that he still owed headers to a few people going on three years, and they were getting pissed.
So he collected money, disconnected his phone, and closed down his website with several hundred dollars that wasn't his since he neglected to fill orders. I was rather upset and kept in contact with several people, and then there were someone who said, "I got mine yesterday, it only took two weeks. Give me your name and address and I'll make sure he sends yours out COD." People jumped at it, and a month later even that "special" person couldn't get an answer and now people were mad at him, too.
So I got an idea...he wouldn't answer my phone calls, nor my emails, so I called and gave friends name and address, never letting on that it was me, and guess what? Two weeks later I got my original headers COD! So if you knew him or had been talking to him he did nothing about it, but if you just places an order and never talked to him again you would get your order right away.
Several people contacted the authorities and even private investigators to track him down. To this day people are still out a couple hundred dollars and are too far away to sue him, so they lose out.
The funny part to this whole story is that every time I had mentioned to someone about how he ripped people off, there was always someone coming to his defense claiming,
"but he's a really nice guy".Let's see: lie and steal from your customers, make promises you can't keep, ask for help and then claim nobody is helping you, lie some more, change your phone number, change your email, and then keep money people paid you several years ago. Yeah, real nice guy!
Oh yeah, and by the time I finally got around to putting my headers on my car, there was someone else making headers and I loaned them my car for the test fitting since they're close by and got a nice set at cost. My original headers that took me two years to get? I put them on ebay and in less than two hours someone bought them at twice what I paid for them. If I had let the auction go, people were paying even more and I could have made about $400 profit. How's that for irony?
I guess the whole point is that it doesn't matter how nice you are to people you aren't doing business with, what matters is how nice you are to the people who are sending you money.
