Website design scam!!

Red1980_2

This is a warning to anyone looking to have a website built for any purpose. I have been the unfortunate victim of a criminal scam.

I paid this individual £180 and was provided with an invoice. I was then met with a wall of silence despite numerous attempts to contact the person. I have since had to go down the horrendously difficult route of court action.

I have since been informed that this has happened to numerous other trusting buyers.

This individual is conning people out of thousands of pounds and, as he moves address on several occasions, it is very hard for the law to catch up with him.

I urge everybody to steer clear of this person whose details are as follows:

Company: Starlight Web

(Text removed by MSE Forum Team)

Wammer

Did you pay by credit card (seeing as this is the credit card forum)?

If so you can claim from your CC company under Section 75.

ETA - apt name of the accused BTW

forgotmyname

Reported them for being registered as a non trading individual?

Then report them for failing to display a trading address on their website.

Fruit_and_Nut_Case

Wammer wrote: »

...(seeing as this is the credit card forum)?

Yes, I'm surprised it hasn't been moved, given that the OP has been seen and edited by the Forum Team.

Hoof_Hearted

No landline, no address. These are some of the first things to check out before buying. The website looks good but it is not difficult to create a nice website. Was £180 for the whole site? If so, too cheap.

-pete-_2

£180 is far too cheap, most reputable companies would charge you at least £400 for something half decent.

If you aren't looking to pay that much I would advise that you checkout Squarespace or another website builder system to do it yourself.

It sucks that you were scammed though, I know there are some very shady characters in the industry.

arianna143

Rush them to court. You have paid them so you must have there bank account number there you can find there contact details.

debbiereynolds76

-pete- wrote: »

£180 is far too cheap, most reputable companies would charge you at least £400 for something half decent.

If you aren't looking to pay that much I would advise that you checkout Squarespace or another website builder system to do it yourself.

It sucks that you were scammed though, I know there are some very shady characters in the industry.

Second this.. 180 is way too cheap. It should take at least 30 hours to create a basic site from scratch even using backend CMS systems like wordpress. Or you can use a simple template from wordpress to create a site - but it will not be specific to your market and conversion rates will be low.

All in all, if you have an e commerce site or are selling anything, get a decent web development company to work on it and factor in paying about 1000 incl VAT