I hired a company through Elance to write the code for a beta site and an iPhone app. They were based in India. After a couple of months of working with them, I started to get the feeling that they were not in this to write code and get paid. After completing and getting paid for two milestones, things got from bad to worse. They set up Skype conferences with me and my team at ungodly hours and never showed up. It happened time after time. They became more and more demanding of late night meetings followed up with early morning ones with other members of their team. They did give me the ad hoc version of the iPhone app but the website work had long stalled. They said they were putting different people on the job, etc.... The ad hoc version was beautiful and worked perfectly. They wanted me to give them my Apple iTunes connect log in information. They said that since it was so technical to upload the app they would do it for me at no additional charge. I had already set up my account with Apple and wanted to do it myself. They tried again to get my log in information. When I said that under no uncertain terms would I give them that information, they got very ugly. I called Apple and they said NO WAY give them any information like that because they could go directly into my banking information. Elance tried to convince me to give it to them for just a few minutes. They said that I could watch them and only let them have it for a while and then change everything. Can you believe that?
They were 200% behind schedule on the app and the website just became too frustrating to deal with them so I asked them if we could consider the app job done and consider them paid in full for the app since I had already paid them far more than I would have in the first place. That's when they informed me that their company policy was to NEVER give up source code even though it was clearly stated in our contract that I would be the owner and I had a full non compete and NDA. I offered to pay them even more for the source code but they refused. So, I took the job into dispute with them through Elance. Elance was less than helpful. After weeks of being ignored by Elance, I informed them that my daughter was just graduated from Law School, was moving back in with me, wanted to work for the public defender's office but since the state was broke had precious little to do but contemplate working for me, and that I was a blogger with a substantial audience. I got a call from the VP within hours. They acted like they would help me. They told me that the company that I had hired had been suspended from their site. I found out later that the suspension happened 1 day after I started negotiating with QBit Systems India Ltd. (the company that I hired through their site). They suspended them for things that they did with other companies but failed to tell me and let me negotiate with them for 3 weeks and eventually hire them. We went through dispute which took several more weeks. I won obviously. I got this email from QBit when they found out about the dispute:
We already have lot of partners who are interested in buying the intellectual property developed, therefore I don’t think so it will be necessary for us to file a case at this juncture.
Therefore we will simply sell it and exit from this dispute.
Thanks for all your support.
Thanks
Vikas Gupta
Elance told me that they had a bunch of QBit's money frozen for other escrows and that I should contact my credit card company and dispute the charges to Elance and that they would not fight it. When QBit found out they sent me some nasty IM's. The money that I paid out is nothing compared to the value of the intellectual property. The day I got the email from QBit telling me they were selling my product to someone else, I got a call from my bank letting me know that my business account had been hacked. I told them about the problem in India and they said it probably has something to do with it. Today I uploaded a video to YouTube that I made within hours of finding out about all of this. Within 30 minutes I got an IM from QBit which was simply a GIF of a 2 pop countdown. It was like a subtle hint that they are watching what I'm doing. I'm not sure if I'm getting paranoid but it seems like they are still accessing my computer. We did a screen share a few months back. I'm trying to get some press about this whole thing. I'm going to make sure I do everything I can so that this doesn't happen to anyone else and bring these parties to justice. Would you forward this email and these links to anyone that you feel would benefit by the information? Here's the YouTube links.
YouTube - Outsourcing Horror Story Part 1
YouTube - Outsourcing Horror Story Part 2 I look horrible in the video and I'm a bit embarrassed because it's so emotional but I think it tells the story quite well
