To Whom It May Concern, TL;DR version: Don't do business with Morewave Communication/Wesley Penner in Vancouver, BC. You are likely to get scammed.
Long version: I'm writing as a fellow vendor of VoIP-related services to advise you that we have had an extremely unfavourable experience with Morewave Communication, a VoIP provider based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Morewave is headed up in part or in full by one Wes Penner. It is my hope in writing this to save others the pain of chasing Morewave generally and Wes personally for money. Our interaction with Wes has been characterised by extremely spotty, poor communication on his part. He has a tendency to disappear for days or weeks on end, and later claim that he has a busy schedule and wears many hats. As a result, trying to advance even the smallest of technical goals essential to the completion of a project tests even the most pliant and generous person's patience. He contacts on his schedule, on his terms, whenever he feels like it, without any regard whatsoever to any communication received by him in the interval since his last unannounced hit-and-run. This in and of itself is not so exceptionally uncommon. However, Wes has defrauded us of a ~$3500 payment in connection with a small project. The contract stipulated that it was due upon completion of the work. A reasonable period of post-delivery testing and evaluation was foreseen, and very fair. However, it has been almost a month since we delivered, and we have gone unpaid. The most disconcerting element of our interaction has not been the lack of payment, which could be for any number of reasons, but rather the obvious desire on Wes's part to shift the costs and risks of his business onto us, the vendor. Specifically, he has articulated a particular point of view of what it means for the project to be "complete" that ties our payment to the vicissitudes of his own wildly variable personal schedule, and additionally, to the fulfillment of business objectives on his end. In other words, rather than to paying us for the deliverable that we were contracted to deliver, Wes takes the view that he has no obligation whatsoever to pay us until precisely such a time as he gets around to using it in a way that is subjectively satisfying to him. He has stated that he will not pay until he puts production traffic on our network element, which in and of itself is not necessarily controversial. However, weeks have gone by without any progress on this objective, and he disappears for long periods without any communication or status update and has been extremely difficult to get a hold of. Moreover, very adequate demonstration of the deliverable's functionality has been provided in lieu of his employment of it in production. He does not dispute the functionality nor feature-completeness of the deliverable, but rather finds that he does not need to pay until he feels like calling the matter "complete". This is akin to not paying for a billboard until you receive a certain dollar amount of business from it, or not paying your ISP because you haven't yet found anything interesting on the web. Moreover, it is an impudent attempt to shift the burdens and risks of implementation onto the vendor, when in fact the procurement of capital goods is a risk precisely for the entrepreneur to assume. My charitable speculation is that Wes never had the money, and somehow intended to come up with it in whatever time frame suits him, on the theory that he could get away with it. The "constantly busy" routine would then constitute camouflage for insolvency. That's not a new routine. We've been burned before and haven't said anything. It takes a lot to compel me to make a public scene. However, I truly and wholeheartedly believe that this guy is going to scam others in an effort to spend money only in a way that suits him, and does not reflect how business actually works. From this experience, as well as his impertinent attitude, spastic hit-and-run communication style, and ability to drag out simple matters into lengthy affairs with the intent of avoiding payment, I would call into question his creditworthiness or suitability as a customer for professional services, if not other services. At the very least, I would strongly suggest a mandatory 100% pre-pay policy. Thanks, -- Alex -- Alex Balashov - Principal Evariste Systems LLC 260 Peachtree Street NW Suite 2200 Atlanta, GA 30303 Tel: +1-678-954-0670 Fax: +1-404-961-1892 Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/ -- _____________________________________________________________________ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-biz mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz
