Jerry was listed on Able Commerce's site as a "premiere" partner for customizations. Seeing that I visited the Chicagoland area often, I figured he would be a great provider. I was quoted 5k for customizations to be completed by his team in two weeks which was faster and cheaper than the other quotes I received. That's when the good news stopped.
The original contract he sent over was a corrupt zip file. After another day of delay, he then resent two pdfs. A 50% deposit was sent to him (standard for consulting). A week and a half went by, and he was overdue for his first deliverable, a project outline and a functionality map. He tried to send it days later as a zip file. I was unable to open it. He resent it again the following early morning as a txt file and asked me to rename it as a zip file. It was still corrupted.
I got suspicious and used a hex editor to examine the contents of the file. It ended having a jpeg header (JFIF), so I renamed the extension to.jpg. All of the corrupt files he had originally sent were screenshots of an ornament site, http://www.italianornaments.com/. This means, he knowingly and intentionally took an image file and renamed it as a zip file in order to pass it off as work completed. After bringing this to his attention did he finally produce a few screenshots of what would supposedly be a smooth modification. At this point, there wasn't a lot of confidence in him, and it was clear he did that to buy time. He already had 50% of our money, and there wasn't really much we could do but wait to see what he would produce.
Two months of back and forth communication finally revealed that he was just wasting our time. I never saw any progress on the proposed project, only delay after delay. We ended up going with another provider who finished our project well under deadline.
After demanding a refund from him of our deposit due to lack of deliverables and repeated inquiries, he promised to have it within 2-3 weeks. After 5 weeks of no response and no refund, I let the issue die — it just wasn't worth my time. He has since been taken off of Able Commerce's partner page. Stay away from this guy. He's a con artist.
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