I initially contracted with D2A Group, aka Scott Hawkins (nickname "Tex") who supposedly works with Cathi Miller (nickname "Cat"), to build my website in April. I never had any communication with Cathi, only Scott.
I paid him a total of $400 with the first payment of $200 on April 21.
Scott put together an broken, empty shell of my photography website and then failed to finish it. He abruptly stopped work after I paid him the second half of the $400 we agreed on.
What was wrong with my website?
I'm a photographer, so images are everything. Except on the website Scott built. My gallery photos were not there. Not one. There were several placeholders for different galleries, but no photos.
My "Contact Us" form did not work and actually showed some random contact information for somebody in Germany. I'm in Massachusetts. I tried to fill out the form to test it.instead of sending an e-mail to me, it returned an error message.
He also failed to follow consistent directory structure. Text content for a particular gallery was sometimes in the right sub-folder. Other times it was a mile away. This is a mistake I'd expect from a middle school student. Not knowing where content is located makes it pretty hard to update later.
After a long period of no contact, Scott eventually apologized and promised a refund and did in fact refund 1/2 of my $400 payment in early July. He asked whether I could give him until the end of the month to send the remaining $200. Trying my best to be reasonable, I agreed.
I write this complaint on September 7. Scott has still not refunded the remaining $200. And he has not answered my e-mails since July 3 - that's 66 days with zero contact.
In the interim, I have been forced to find another web designer to fix the mess that Scott made. We started from scratch and now have a fully functional website.
Surprisingly, I was contacted today by somebody in a similar situation in California. He states that he paid Scott $500 for a website and is now facing the same vanishing act as I am. No website, no contact.
Worse yet, he states the Scott Hawkins used my website as an example of his work! The website I hired SOMEBODY ELSE to build after Scott failed to complete his job!
Scott seems to get most of his business through Craigslist. He has a website for that business at http://handscribed.com, though he called himself D2A Group when he first contacted me.
His cell phone number (510-621-8184) also comes up in a google search on a website called www.songnumbers.com, so he seems to be affiliated with that business too. I don't know exactly how.
There are plenty of good web designers / web programmers out there. Do yourself a favor and AVOID SCOTT HAWKINS aka Tex aka handscribed.com aka D2A Group aka www.songnumbers.com - or whatever name he's using these days.
I hesitate to use the term SCAM ARTIST to describe Scott Hawkins, but I certainly feel like I've been well and truly abused in dealing with him.
From April to July I had the only thing worse than no website at all. I had a BROKEN website. That damaged my ability to launch my company and damaged my image in the eyes of anybody who looked at the defective site.
Finally, it's worth noting that yesterday I gave Scott Hawkins 24 hours to refund the last of my money and told him that if he did not do so, I was going to post the truth about what he did to me here on usacomplaints.com.
His final 24 hours have expired and once again, he has refused to even acknowledge my e-mails. No contact, no refund.
I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised.
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