The name of the company is Cyberwings Communications, Inc. Shawn J. White is a CON ARTIST A LIAR AND A SCAMMER!
Read the problems:
In about March I saw an advertisement for a company named Cyberwings that was offering yearly hosting of websites for a very low, $5.00 per year, on sale for half off.
As a person who runs a small hobby/fan site, I figured this would be a great way to save some money on my hosting costs.
I decided what the heck, for this price I will join up and see what happens. All I had to lose was really, roughly 3 bucks for a year's service.
After I paid up by paypal.com, I had my account set up in about 5 days. Somewhat long, but I didn't mind because the price was great.
I had respectable service from March through July... Roughly 4 months.in April, after one month of service, I registered 2 more domain names, and set up 2 more annual hosting accounts, this time at about 5.50 each.
This time it took even longer to set up my account, about 10 days. No problem, these sites weren't even developed yet.in June, I had my new site online and hosted.
In July is when the problems began. I went away for a week's vacation, only to come home to a bunch of concerned emails from website viewers asking why my site was not available. They were right, it was offline, and had been for a few days.
I immediately went to www.cyberwings.com (the website URL of my hosting company) and saw that the website of my host was blank, except for a few lines saying "this is the placeholder page for cyberwings.com". After a few days of checking back, there was a message about how their servers were down, and service would be restored shortly.
I dropped an email to the technical support people asking what was going on with my service, and why I wasn't sent an email explaining the downtime.
This is just common courtesy, to send an email to your customers saying "our web servers are down, we are working on the problem".
I (and others) received no such notifications. We were informed by the cyberwings.com URL about some issues and problems, and that the staff was working 'dilligently' to resolve the issues, our sites would be back up in approximately 3 days.
So, I waited. Almost a week had passed, and I realized (after having used other hosts) that a one week outage for a web hosting company is not a common occurence, nor is it a sign of a stable and dependable company. I decided to forgo my space at Cyberwings, and I moved my page to a new host.
I still had 2 lesser sites hosted at cyberwings, which I was not too concerned about, so I decided to stay abreast of the happenings and see when those sites would be available, or how the company was giong to offer compensation or refunds for time lost.
Eventually, a long winded message was posted by the CEO Shawn White on the cyberwings page explaining all these supposed problems that had befallen him, things that were beyond his control, not his fault... Shawn said the company providing his service (Lightship) had cut him off for no good reason. He said it was their fault we didn't have service.
Come to find out later, the reason Lightship cut him off is because he hadn't paid his bills! Shawn continued to lie to his customer base, saying he just moved his whole company to a new, larger, better data facility in Virginia.
When asked to provide his customers with some proof or photos of this new data facility, Shawn gave the excuse that he was sharing it with a government data center and was not allowed to take photos due to security issues! (this was an outright lie, the government never shares data centers with small hosting companies, or any other non government companies for that matter).
Another lie from Shawn. Shawn finally decided to offer 'refunds' to those who wanted them, but you had to file a ticket for a refund at the help desk, an online website. I filed my ticket for a total refund of roughly 15.00.
There was no way to contact Shawn, no phone number, no contact for employees, nothing but a P.O. Box. The only way we received refund and news updates was through the front page of his website (which was updated a total of roughly 3 times during the month and a half of troubles) and an IRC chat room.
Shawn has been nothing but rude, conniving, nasty, and full of crap. His staff (of about 3-4 others) have been caught harassing customers by phone because they were speaking out publicly against the company and Shawn. One staff member even went (allegedly) as far as taking the personal information from an outspoken customer, and calling them and threatening them. Shawn was belligerent, negligent, and wasn't offering any refunds, though he said he would. He promised a deadline of August 9th for refunds, which he claimed would come by certified check.
Some people got smart and requested chargebacks through paypal, but before most people could, paypal informed customers that Cyberwings business account had been closed due to lack of funds. Other people paid through another online service, 2checkout.com and most received refunds through this company.
Shawn issued 2 refunds that I know of, one to the owner of a website: www.cyberwingsowesmemoney.com for roughly 250.00, and one to another customer who was very vocal, for about 2.30.
She received her check in the form of a money order put together in Silver Spring, MD. Since these 2 checks were received about august 9th, no one else out of the tons of people owed money has received so much as a penny, or an email. The CEO will not give updates on refunds, and we all assume there will be none.
But wait, it gets better. Shawn's own staff has mostly turned against him, claiming that Shawn owes them a few thousand dollars in pay. His own staff is not positive of his whereabouts, nor do they know what he is up to, nor have they talked to him in weeks. Some have even gone as far as trying to physically locate him. No one seems to be able to.
Just when people have resigned themselves to the fact that they won't see their (roughly 11,000 between everyone) money or service ever again, and figure - at least this company and Shawn have gone away, never to do anyone else harm again - his website, www.cyberwings.com goes back online! A relaunch!
Now, there are no more apologetic posts on the main site explaining all his problems and how he will be relaunching his services, making it even bigger and better, and promising all his 'current' customers even more free space... But there is NOTHING about the current customers here! Just a website touting his company as "The People's Internet Company!".. And stating that "Cyberwings will completely relaunch in the Late Summer & Early Fall of 2002 with Faster Servers, Integrated Customer Management and more!".
Add in to the mix that past customers have done some research on Shawn and found that he has been heavy into the MLM scheme. He has marketed magic diet pills, "the golden fleece" and many other get rich quick schemes. Also, we have found that as early as 1999, Shawn opened up a hosting company, and then vanished again, only to reopen in 2001 as Cyberwings. It seems he is trying to do this yet again.
He has scammed thousands of people... And owes them and his employees and providers upwards of 15,000. He is trying to start his scam up again! His new terms of service cover himself for failure to provide service, and claim his new service will be non refundable! Amazing! He is going to scam people all over again with this internet hosting service... And he will get away with it if he isn't stopped.
I want to see this scam stop. I don't want to see any others get taken, even for 5.00. See, not as many people that could have complained or requested a refund did so, because well, it was only a few bucks, right? Who cares? Well that's what he counts on. He doesn't count on people getting angry, and giving him bad PR. He hates bad pr. HE got plenty from some 'anti' Cyberwings websites that were started after his site when down.
We would like our money back, and we would like to see Shawn White never run a business (legal or not) ever again! This man should be in jail for fraud.
Please view these pages for more information. I have left out TONS of information so that this email isn't overly lengthy. Some of the best sites to read the story of Cyberwings Scam are here:
Http://www.cyberwingsowesmemoney.com
http://www.cyberwingssucks.com
http://www.cyberwingsscam.com/
http://www.purehell.org/
http://www.taebofans.com/cyberwings.html
http://www.yepo.com (a running tally of what Shawn owes people)
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/7/24/232846/987
There are many more, but these should get you started. I, and others, also have our paypal/2checkout.com receipts available to prove payment to Cyberwings. We also have "refund tickets" filed with the company that have gone without even an acknowledgement.
Thank you very much for any help you can offer!
Amy
baltimore, Maryland
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