Anyone experienced in proceeding with cross border legal action against slander/liable on DP?

I am dealing with a disgruntled service client that sought out and requested to hire me to assist them with 2 projects through PM on DP after posting in a discussion thread with advice to his project from his thread.

I'm considering legal action after he stiffed me and my working partners on a promised additional custom installation fee first, then ended up wasting up all the hours of my time that he paid for pre-booked consultations over skype/voice call, initiated a paypal dispute, wasted more of my time, and then I provided a partial refund (which I was doing anyways before the dispute) on the services of my time and the people working with me which can't be recovered. Really this guy took us for a ride, and blamed the whole thing on disagreement on my methods regarding research and prep work for planning a large project involving multiple people in different time zones & challenges working out scheduling due to his limited ~2 hour per day window within the first week.

I'm not here to complain or assistance settling the dispute with them. I though it was settled when I didn't hear back from them after I paid them a partial refund. Now they are trolling my threads and posting slanderous lies about me. I have reported the post, but I guess since he's paid for a premium membership the admins don't want to give him an infraction. I guess that's why I've been getting more infractions since I stopped my premium membership subscription.... I thought that wasn't supposed to happen, I don't know maybe it's just a coincidence...

Has anyone here had any experience pursuing legal action / channels to get posts removed or compensation unlawful slander? What about if you live in different countries, or different states?
Thanks.

 

It will almost never be worth pursuing in court to get a post removed from a website.

Reporting a post for 'slander' is unlikely to get a response from DP because they have no idea if it is accurate or not. Reporting a post for thread-hijacking when the post is not on the topic of the thread is likely to get you much better results and the post removed.

 

xlnd, I prepaid you $150 for 5 hours of work for you to do research on a topic and get back with me. You postponed our scheduled meeting multiple weeks based on time difference (you are in Canada, Im in U.S.), getting injured, your kids being around your office, and a whole row of other reasons. At the end when we did have the meeting you said the person that was supposed to present the information was sleep in a different country and therefore you had nothing to present. You always had a different excuse and never took responsibility for the delays and lack of work.

At that point I was done with trusting you with my project, asked for a partial refund of $70 to end our agreement and you agreed to pay that back. You failed to send the money for another two and half weeks and left my messages and emails un-answered. You replied once saying that "I will send the refund when it is ready" as if sending a PayPal payment takes multiple weeks of delay.

I suspected the only reason you were waiting was for PayPal's 45 days dispute time frame to end so you could keep all the money. I filed a PayPal complaint and PayPal decided in your favor since it was a 'service' not an actual product with shipping. After another multiple emails you decided to send me a $20 partial refund so that in your mind 'put this thing to bed'. You probably even thought 'why the hell doesn't this guy just not give up on his money?'

So at the end I ended up paying you $150, received absolutely no work/report/research and you refunded $20 of it. You troll around the forum claiming on some threads that 'you are short on cash', and others how you are about to 'get a lot of money from various places' and you keep asking other people to invest in you and your projects. I can't but wonder if you are doing the same trick to other people who pay you for projects so in one of your posts, I asked where you are getting the money and whether you continue not honoring your word?

People on this forum have a higher integrity and ethic standards that you hold yourself to sir. Now in the same trend, you are blaming your infractions on 'canceling your premium account' instead of taking responsibility for your own actions. I received a warning from DP on that same day and I intend to listen to it as $130 loss from you won't make or break me.

We all work hard for our money. We don't blame other people for our mistakes and don't expect clients to pay us when we don't do the work for them. My mistake was hiring and trusting you.

 

I reported it for thread hijacking originally but nothing happened.

I didn't receive any infractions when I had my premium account, most likely coincidence or perhaps a higher level of care and attention when posting. I just didn't use it for a while so I stopped paying for it. I expressed my reasons why I haven't started paying for it again in the feedback section of the forum.

You requested your refund based on the number of hours. I issued a refund. If you felt the amount was in error you should have said so, then I could have rectified it. Saying nothing about it at all, seeing me online obviously not blocking any communication from you, but instead poaching my threads, on a completely unrelated topic.

I logged the time I spent, the time my server administrator and my programmer spent preparing information for you on your wikilinks clone site and the google translator project, the skype conversations, the voice calls, the payments you sent, the amounts you agreed to, and the math said I didn't owe you any refund, but I sent one anyways. If you have further dispute of your closed account, then this is not the place to discuss it.

The fact is you asked me to do work for you which I was not advertising or attempting to procure. That is not what I do, I work on my own sites and joint venture partnership projects. Occasionally I subcontract work to people I know and work with because I'm the person in our group with the most sales and marketing experience, making me basically an affiliate.

Posting a thread offering partnerships and joint ventures where different people cover costs for different business expenses is in no way an indication of being short on cash, but rather smart with it. Have you ever heard of the term broker? Yeah, it's not a huge stretch to read my signature and deduce that I might be involved in brokering website sales and acquisitions.

Put through your refund request properly and get rid of your posts and attitude and I will process your refund, AGAIN. Then stay out of my threads and I won't offer to help you in any of yours ever again.

 

I have sent you a money request on PayPal for the amount of $50 (difference between $70 promised and $20 processed)

 

You still have this post in my thread:
https://forums.digitalpoint.com/thr...3-months-revenue-stats.2656639/#post-18583530

For somebody who owns legal directory sites and claims to have so much business experience online, I didn't expect to have to waste a good 10 hours and lose money for working on your sites only to turn around and see you breaking the rules here, so I would like some assurances / insurance to avoid any further extortion from you. Please provide a full (simple few sentences) declaration in writing (digital) from you promising not to post or spread any more slander, hijack any threads or do anything else to undermine my business efforts, a simple email with full definition of your identity and location, the matter and your consensual agreement to settle this dispute now and forever, and never to attempt to purchase services from me or any website owned or managed by me.
If you want digital products however, help yourself to anything once, on the house.


After I am able to process your second additional refund request, they have this thing called a bank transfer you might have heard of it. It's where I tell my bank to send some money to my paypal account. From all the way up here in Canada the powers that be state it takes 5-7 business days for the funds to clear. Once the funds clear from the local bank to the paypal system, then notification reaches my desk, I am then able to login and send the payment. This is what the process referred to as "processing your refund request" is referring to. I hope this enlightening conversation eases your anxiety and paranoia of impending doom should nothing arrive in the first 72 hours. If you feel the need to reach out and say hello just to make sure I am still alive, none of my contact information has changed really.

 

And I didn't expect you to take my money, deliver zero results, and still think you are the one on the right side here.

We agreed that for the $70 refund the matter would be closed. You being who you are, decided to send $20 instead. Once the $70 is received the matter is closed. I can't delete my posts on DP (no more edit link) and I wouldn't anyways. You should have thought about bad reviews before you decided to take the money without delivering.

Then you should have said no to the project. Instead you asked for prepaid payment.

 

Normally there is not a refund on a deposit payment for a service contract when the work is booked and started. We engaged in research as requested, we put together notes, we asked you all the key questions needed to know in order to complete your final needs. We have logs, you can't say we didn't deliver. You had paid for my time, and the time of others, and you used up way more of my time and their time than you paid for at all, yet you are still getting refunds instead of us completing the job as we said we would and receiving further payment. You wasted our time and your own time, just like when you refused even a temporary ftp account to access your server and fix your problem with our properly working code running with no errors on our server.

You asked me if I COULD do this work for YOU. I said I COULD, I indicated it required more time for me to confer with experts and do some research. I made recommendations and gave advice to you for procuring your own service provider. You asked me instead. When somebody asks me for help, I do my best to help them. I explained to you how I handle gigs where people want to hire me for my time completing services. You agreed to those terms. You have broken those terms. I should have put it in a contract, yes.

I did not make any agreement of an amount for a refund. We spoke about # of HOURS being refunded. As I told you, counting hours, you weren't entitled to any refund anyways, so I gave you one. Now I'm looking to give a SECOND REFUND.

I am still waiting for a very simple, paragraph in writing from you stating that you will cease all slander/liable flaming, thread hijacking or other activities, that you agree that this is a fair dissolution of our dealings and you will refrain from attempting to purchase services from any of us or our sites ever again. Only then can I give in to the extortion and pay you another refund. I've even basically written it for you, you just have to agree to it and send it.

 

You promised a research for the $150 payment and delivered nothing. You promised $70 refund and instead sent $20. You won't get any 'paragraphs' from me. You can refund the remaining $50 and put this to bed or you can keep giving excuses.