I can understand your frustration there mate, but sometimes people with 'real life' businesses get caught up in a lot of stuff and they don't have time for forum and internet stuff. I have had this situation myself a number of times. Obviously, if you are running a contest you should make sure you can afford to pay the winner first and you should try and make a point of seeing it through to it's conclusion and i'm sure hawksdomain would be the first to admit that. I think you pushing him for payment etc. by providing your paypal on every PM to him probably discouraged him from doing it anyway. You need to give people a chance to do things before thinking they will not do it etc. I am sure the guy is legit and has simply made an error of judgement here. I say give him a chance to pay you, in business you can wait up to 2 months to be paid for your work sometimes. It's different online of course as you expect payment immediately but let's just sit tight and see what happens. I'm sure it will have a successful outcome mate!
No i don't think there are any rules in place whereby they would intervene. It is definitely a problem, but in the mean time it's just a risk designers wishing to enter contests have to take. The only alternative is not entering contests and sourcing your work and payments from other places.
Just for the record, I had every intention of paying. I did get caught up with other things, and I apologize to the designer for that, but I am also yet to use the logo for any publications either - I said to him, no need to send the logo until I make payment as I do not have the funding at the moment due to other issues., and he sent it anyway - I'm sure other designers who have created things for me in the past would vouch for the fact that I always make the payments. I am still wanting to make the payment and always intended to, I just didn't have the funding until now, and because of that I didn't ask for the design yet.
I offered the bonus so I could start playing with the logo and doing some design things with it - but I also said to you that there is no need to send the logo yet as I understand I haven't made payment yet.
Maybe he just wanted to see the black background version? Not the actual files just a JPG and he was curious to see how it looked so said he'd add 10 bucks to the total? Maybe not the case but it is possible - he didn't actually ask for a PSD to be sent of that change.
Payment has been made. I'm very dissapointed to receive negative feedback when I explained the situation clearly and always intended to make payment - I have a reputation of always paying and hopefully this negative feedback won't put people off contests I run in the future. I almost considered ditching the logo and disposing of it completely, but it's a quality logo and $85 is a small price to pay for a business identity with such quality.