This site exposes the scam run by Adevox, which was a company set up by Cristian Mihai and Alin Chiriac of Romania.
Adevox is owned by Twenty, which is a company that has had many name changes. For example, Twenty Mark and Twenty Interactive etc are companies wanted by the Romanian Government, and are being pursued for over US$300,000 for penalties and unpaid taxes. To try to avoid their responsibilities, they placed these and other companies into liquidation and tried to sell off these entities to a USA company (also deviously owned by them) so that the Romanian authorise become entangled in US jurisdictions.
This site outlines the various aspects of the scam, which works like this: Under a raft of names, the two men sign up to Elance.com and others, and bid on as many jobs as they can. They offer a slick professional front. The client pays them a deposit, and they go and hire programmers. The programmers are lured on the promise of good pay. With the deposit in hand, they send a few sketches to the client who is under the impression that the project is being started. Then Adevox (or the name at the time) asks for the balance, all the while, no work has been done: just a few sketches that anyone could have done.
When Adevox receives the balance (now 100% of the funds plus some more money for additional design needs), they string clients along for as long as possible until they have built up many such clients to whom they have lied and conned and mislead. Then, when it becomes obvious to the clients that the project is not progressing, the level of complaints start to rise. Staff are told to lie. And clients are ignored for months on end with stories such as staff being mentally ill or suffering a family breakdown etc, seeking sympathy and more tolerance from the client. Then, one day, out of the blue, with no warning, they shut down their website, and they cancel all email addresses, and they sack all the relevant staff and programmers (who are owed money). They never pay their staff taxes, which means that for the staff to whom they might have made a small salary to string them along, later find that their taxes were never paid.
They use a long list of different emails and company names. So much so that it becomes impossible to know who to sue. This site will show you the seemingly endless array of emails, addresses, company names, and executive names. This is what we have managed to find out and can legally share. We have a lot more information that we are unable to put here due to a range of laws. Imagine how much more there is to uncover when authorities, with their probing powers, delve into these shady unethical men.
Elance has already refunded one client who had already released funds from escrow. One bank has already reversed a credit card transaction. The sensible organisations who look into this scam soon realise that Alin Chiriac and Cristian Mihai are con artists.
Here is an example of their audacity: if a client asks Adevox/Twenty to build a blog, they promise the earth and charge thousands of dollars. The client is under the impression that a whole new exclusive blog theme is being programmed from the ground up, as per the brief. Instead, Adevox just signs the client up to WordPress. This is as laughable as someone paying thousands for a programmer to build an email network, and Adevox just signs them up to Hotmail. Remember when Hotmail and Yahoo were leaders in email? Imagine when Google decided to offer its own email network. Under this scenario, Adevox would have agreed to build the Google email network, charged a few million dollars, and in return, they would have gone to Hotmail.com and signed-up a new users called Google, and within one minute flat, they would have gone back to Google and said, ‘There you go, we have created an email for you.’ Worse than this is that they would not have gone back to Google at all. They would have taken the money and disappeared. They would have shut down their site, cancelled all phone numbers and emails, sacked the staff, and then changed their company name. And when pursued by lawyers, they never respond. And when challenged by PayPal and others, they would say that they did their job, but unfortunately, the client was fussy. How can signing-up to WordPress be called building a blog? No more than opening a bank account with a $1 deposit be called ‘designing a new world bank’.
This is exactly what they did with so many clients. The frustrating part is that when clients go to seek legal avenues, someone will ask, ‘But did they deliver anything?’ and the client will reply, ‘They opened a Hotmail account instead of designing a whole new system for me…’ From this technicality, the third party will say, ‘Well, it is not up to us to judge how good the result is. You got something, and this means that Adevox met its obligations under clause xyz of the terms.’
The scam is evident. The endless list of staff and clients can attest to this. The two con artists have received letters of demands, and like true recalcitrant fraudsters, they fear no one and care about no one, and respond to no one.
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Thank you. The Hunter.
P.S. Click on THE DRAMA links on the left side, to learn about the scam and the scammers.
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