This post will show you the complete history of my business deal with Maxine James, who deals in Proprties, UK Property, Turkey Property, Properties In Turkey, Properties In UK. His two main websites are www.property-turkey.com and www.maxestate.com
On Oct 16, 2006 7:44 PM Maxine James contacted me and showed his interest to develop him is real estate website for www.maxestate.com domain. He told me he was running www.property-turkey.com (Property in Turkey For Sale | Buy Property in Turkey) already to deal in Property Turkey, Properties in Turkey, Turkey Properties, Buy House in Turkey, Buy Hotels and Land in Turkey.
As I work as freelance so it was a good opportunity for me and I agreed to work for him on his project. After several emails exchange finally we agreed upon a real estate portal for US$3000.
After the agreement Maxine James DISAPPEARED for one month. I send him many emails e.g this one
——— One of the Emails to Maxine James after he disappeared ———-
Hi Max,
I just wanted to know if you are still interested in your project as I didn’t hear from you for the last two weeks.
In fact I wanted to manage my schedule for future projects so that’s why just wanted to confirm if your project would be on on the list.
Regards,
Haroon———————————————————– I sent him this email after two weeks of his silence because I am an offshore freelancer and I have to manage my time to work on the tasks and make sure I am not sitting ‘without projects’ I hope any professional understand my point. But he didn’t bother to reply me and I sent him many other emails but he didn’t reply. Meanwhile another customer offered me a project and I started to work on that.Then after one plus month Maxine James emailed me that he wanted me to work for him too and I made him clear that I will work in parallel.Payment terms were decided as follow to start the project,Maxine James, www.property-turkey.com www.maxestate.com , will pay me 40% of the total project cost as downpayment, 30% from the remaining project cost after 80% of the work is completed and remaining 30% when I finish the project and install it on his server.One thing I must mention here is that I HAD NOT GIVEN ANY SPECIFIC DEADLINE FOR THE PROJECT COMPLETION TO MAXINE JAMES I TOLD HIM I WILL TRY MY BEST TO FINISH IT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE WHILE WORKING PARALLEL ON OTHER PROJECTS TOO
He paid me US$1000 and I started to work on his project.
I made him one very good website interface as a mock up for the site and sent to him, first he asked me to change some colours and other stuff. I made the changes then he asked me to make a new one as he didn’t like that interface. Now if he didn’t like then why he did he ask me to do changes in the interface? that is a big and first point to proove the delay in completion.
After that I made him another very high class website mock up and after taking one week he rejected that one too. He said that I was making sites which look like tempaltes and he didn’t want to get a template looks website and an original and unique design. I, once again, started to work on a new design and worked very hard to produce an outstanding 3d style mockup for him.
Please let me tell you I have been designing for the last six years and you can see my designing work samples at www.fastcreators.com/portfolio.php
After taking yet another week he also rejected that one and then I was really frustrated and I TOLD HIM that this way it will become very hard to complete the project in timely manner because he had taken almost one month and four website interfaces and I ALSO TOLD HIM that it is a loss for me to design again and again as it is affecting my other tasks going in parallel and the next I had to start.
After that he took one week and one day he sent me a SCREENSHOT of a website. Now please notice this, that he rejected four very outstanding designs because he pretend to get original and unique design then he himself sent me a screenshot of another website and asked me to make its close.
At that time I TOLD MAXINE JAMES THAT THIS WILL BE THE FINAL DESIGN and I confirmed each and everything from him again and again and made the design of www.maxestate.com He was very happy to get that and he confirmed it many times.
Afrer that I started to design the database and ERDs and DFDs etc and started the practical programming of the portal. I always sent him updates every week on the website.
After ther 60% of the work was done I was frustrated due to his time wasting demands for example when I designed the Searching Form according to the pre-decided method he asked me to change the output of the form totally and gave me another third party site Search Form link and asked to make it work like that one.
I re-programmed the different areas to match his desires and completed the search form again.
To tell you one other from many, when I started to work on the admin panel he asked me to add new features time to time for him without any extra money for example the feature to add the descriptions for the countries which was never on the features list.
And I kept working silently with him just because I was giving respect to him and didn’t want to reject his any UNFAIR demands even and I think this was where I encouraged him to steal my money!
I completed him complete FRONT END interface including information pages, very complex and detailed property search form, dynamic portfolio manager, javascript based property images gallery, php application to resize the heavy images on the fly to make the site fast browsing, Newsletter sign up system, currency calculator, mod-rewrite based complex Search Engine Friendly URLs scheme, country and city based property browsing, dynamic and very hi-fi contact us page with image captcha, property enquiry system to display a form with each property and to mail admin and related agent the information with form and email validation and many other things.
I also completed a very rich features Admin Panel for him to control all the websites including adding , editing agents information. adding, editing, deleting proeprties, to upload images for each property, to add news to display on the main site, to edit and delete the news, to add locations, to add descriptions for cities , to add descriptions for countries, mailing list system for bulk mailing the newsletter to the subscribed users, a dynamic application to handle unsubscriptions and subscriptions, integrating rich text editor and everything you can imagine to control a complex real estate portal.
And please count five website interfaces in this work too.
After completing this there were only two tasks left, one was to make the title of the pages to change page by page which any technical person here knows it is one hour work and to fix two bugs in the site.
By now I must have paid 30% more of the total project cost according to our agreement as Maxine James www.property-turkey.com www.maxestate.com had to pay me after 80% of the completion and by now the 99% of the work had been completed.
I sent him email to pay me US$1500 and keep $500 with him that he must pay me after I have finished the title changing and bugs fixes.
And this was the point where he started to show me his reality.
He rejected to pay me and started to insult me in very rude emails. He told me that he would get the SEO done by someone else so I should left title and meta tags task and subtract its money from the task. Any technical fellow here knows that the most complex and time consuming thing is to apply Search Engine Friendly URLs which I had already done for him but still he was making waves. When I explained him this in a very polite email, I swear, he replied me in a very very rude email blamming me that I was insulting him and I didn’t know the English and I was not aware of business ethics and to tell someone else to communicate with him……..
hhhh! Do you to listen more to? to confirm his ill-reality and how does he want to eat my US$2000?
I replied him in the next email and I told him that why was he blamming me that I had insulted him? I didn’t say anything like that and IF HE THINKS I did it by mistake I apologize for that…. Yes I apologized for doing nothing because at that time I was smelling that Maxine James www.maxestate.com www.property-turkey.co.uk was trying to eat my money by making issues.
In my reply to this polite email he told me that to refund his US$1000 even AND fellows do notice here that all code is on his server in full functional state.
After that I was confirmed of his ill-deeds and I entered with him in a dispute and I told him clearly that he was trying to eat my money and it is not fair please please pay my money and we are done.
But he continously rejected saying that I had taken more time to complete the task. If anybody on eart will make five website intefaces, work in parallel, add extra features to the site and redo many things 0n customer’s demand then CAN HE COMPLETE the proejct in a timely manner?
After this I was hurt badly and I decided not to keep silence on this otherwise it will encourage Maxine James like guys to steal money from innocent hard workers like me. So I called my Uncle in Bermingham who is British Citizen there and owns a few businesses. After hearing to all my story my uncle assured my to support me by all means to take Maxine James, his all partners to the court as UK law has very severe penalties for such cases and my uncle asked me to consult my cousins who lives in London and one of them works with famous Barrister Mr. Scots Wright.
I also contacted my all friends in different countries and different fields about this mishap and they have assured me all kinds of support e.g discussing this issue against www.property-turkey.com and www.maxestate.com in all UK communities websites including Myspace and one of my friend is a journalist and she has assured me to put this news on the headlines of famous newspapers once the court summons Maxine James and any other affiliates of him and his businesses to attend the court. So lots of is coming your way. Keep visiting my site and also read other posts I will post day by day to tell you about our efforts and the links of all comunities where we will discuss the big black sheeps story.
I hope I will succeed to teach all the affiliate and owner of www.property-turkey.com and www.maxestate.com the lesson of their lives!
In my next posts I will tell you the efforts I am doing to make my this site to come in the top search results of all UK search engines for property businesses so that any innocent customer or businessman can read about the reality of these people and can avoid doing business with them. I will also send emails to almost all of the Turkey, USA and UK based property dealers for their knowledge too.
I already got an unlimited outgoing email offer from another gentleman who is also the victim of these people and who will shake them in the court hopefully and also I am organizing his case to publish on this site too.
IF you are also their victim do post me your case , this is not just for your rights but for the rights of all fair professionals who don’t get paid after doing hard work of days and nights.
Keep visiting my site and tomorrow I will install the digg.com like sites plugin here so that you can dig my posts to all famous sites so that all the visitors can read this story.
I want this thing to be viral, just to add my two cents, and in the first phase create a hype like ‘milk milk milk’ unnamed milk… drive people into this thing and in the second phase we will disclose more information in greater details
you can fulfill your promise of putting this thing in the print media in the second phase we do not need it in the first phase now. By the way I read your article on the NGOs issue that is really awesome and in fact I also saw a comments from UNHCR secretary about your article on MySpace blog that he admits you have put up very good stuff for the guidance of many NGOs. thumbs are up for you!