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Very
Lewis 7 months ago.
Sounds like he bought the dip 😂
Lewis set his Instagram account to private after so long. He must've been following this thread
Shilling his own services.
He is. So I have been told by someone close to him.
His alt account has been active today.
There’s good money in aesthetics. Plus he’d be helping out his bff, Austin. Not like he was making any money on hosting when not scamming - despite his alleged experience in the business.
I'm sure he wasn't. Don't mind the hustle, do mind the screwing people over bit.
Got info on Lewis covered, what's left is the connection to the shady us shell.
He clearly did that before in his GoCaravan days:
https://clubtogether.caravanclub.co.uk/discussion/357339/beware-of-a-con
Mh... Austin Wood...
Justin Morgan looks real. He’s on the voting register, he’s got socials that date back years. His dad Gerald even had a legal spat in 2017. Doubt this is faked - too elaborate for a guy like Lewis.
wow, gone through each page, 2026 off to a great start, much drama... I feel for the people that got scammed
A witch hunt is based on belief, not on facts. Remember that, you're gonna need that.
No problem that you are happy with your currently running VPS. You've probably paid for it for some time. Now, you mention here that you "hope to keep", that's some kind of belief (same base as goes for a witchhunt, remember) you have that the current owner is trustworthy.
That in regard that facts are against that: "Eric" has declared:
Basically, you got an agreement with a landlord, you've paid rent on the 1st of January for a year and on the 2nd of February the landlord decides that he sells your house to another one, a stubborn, grumpy guy who doesn't want to listen to reason - but he presents himself as a saviour.
That new one comes to you, just walks in your house without introducing himself, and says that you have to leave before the 1st of March (without getting money back) or, if you're lucky, that you can stay but have to pay rent starting the 1st of March. And before he forgets, it may be that in a couple of weeks time he'll also rent out the upper floor that you have your bedrooms on and were part of the agreement. But you'll get a new front door!
What you are saying now a couple of times that you understand this. The LET members who you are accusing of a witchhunt see this and say "this isn't right" and were, at first, giving him free advice of things that aren't legal or not done right.
At this moment, in my opinion, you're just the neighbour who rents from the same guy and who he didn't visit yet. You're hoping he won't and that you can keep living in your house without re-paying already paid rent.
I could be that person too, because I haven't got an e-mail yet. But I'm not. As said before, I was full of good hope in the beginning of all this also, but the behaviour of "the new one" and what he was burping out in comments struck me. And if you want to call it a witchhunt, go ahead, I don't care. But the thought that you can keep using your VPS without paying more is more of a kind of belief as the things he declared are feeding this (what you call) witchhunt.
Yeah, by then I was already getting suspicious about what was happening; I then already got a VPS of him from an earlier offer (basically because I needed one around that time and didn't want to wait until the "BF crazyness").
It struck me then that he was way too desperate to sell stuff, didn't look at profitability, just wanted to have customers. But hey, I was already a customer of him so had to hope for not the worst.
Maybe, or there have been made some threats against him. I mean, there were idiots that did a DDoS on Christmas day also, and quite often those are from people who are not actively in a discussion like this one, but are victims and following the discussion, getting some info from it and act by themselves.
If anyone has payment card attached to the account, maybe it is best to check it and remove it. I assume bank cards get attached after a payment, since they likely will wish to keep automated renewals with so many chargebacks going on.
I think the card removal option was blocked.
Can anyone confirm something like this?
It's not. I had a card saved, and it's no longer there; it has been removed.
I know this thread is mostly a mix of people only caring about their own uptime and others just here for the popcorn. But for those actually stuck in this mess with me, I wanted to share what I’ve noticed.
This whole thing feels engineered to kill the dispute window. He launched the promos right before the Xmas/New Year holidays when everyone is distracted, and he only officially announced the "takeover" exactly one month later. I’m betting his next "major update" hits in about 7 days—right at the 2-month mark. It feels like a monthly cycle designed to stall just long enough to keep the cash in his original account.
He asked everyone filing a dispute to open a ticket with VeloxMedia first. Don't fall for it. He likely just wants screenshots of those tickets to show payment processors that he’s "communicating" or to claim he’s being hit by "malicious mass chargebacks." It’s a move to save his account’s credit and keep the funds locked away from you.
Since he can’t stop PayPal disputes easily, his only move is to keep the service "barely alive" to numb people into not filing. But notice how he’s rushing to move VPS locations? That’s him cutting costs. It completely contradicts his claims about the scale and operating costs of the company.
I’ve already hit a wall here. I filed a dispute a week ago, and my bank just told me the merchant (Velox) already fought it. The manager said if my next batch of evidence isn't "perfect," the merchant wins by default and I can't appeal again. I sent 2 pages of PDFs last time and it wasn't enough. You need to include screenshots, URLs, and explain the "stalling" tactics clearly.
By claiming a "change in management," he’s built the perfect excuse to deny refunds. He didn't even email all customers—just the ones with "LET" in their product name. He’s clearly crunched the numbers on who is likely to complain and which payment methods are the riskiest for him. He’s keeping the rest of the servers online as "proof" for the banks that he’s still providing service, just to run out the clock.
On a personal note, it’s a bit overwhelming to see how much back-and-forth there is. When a thread gets this big, the actual human cost—people losing their hard-earned money—sometimes gets lost in the debate. It’s easy to look at this from a distance and stay "rational," but for those of us actually dealing with it, it’s a lot more stressful than just an "interesting business case." I just hope everyone can get through this without too much of a loss.
Good luck to everyone fighting for their refunds.
I just want to remind people that it's important to remember that there's a reasonable chance that none of these people are involved.
It's clear that the wheels for this exit scam were being set in motion many months before BF. You absolutely cannot trust a single thing they've told you because a lot of it will have been intentional to shape your baseline assumptions. Sure, they might have slipped up occasionally and said something by accident, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if anyone who's relatively trivial to dig up dirt on has been made easy to find to provide them with a cover.
All the business names involved have been deliberately chosen to cause maximum deception, hiding behind very similar pre-existing company names, there is no reason to suppose that any of their names are real. Even the people who are obviously real might just be victims of identity theft.
For context, as well as the confusion behind the company names and the clear attempts at deception there, there seem to be at least 3 distinct Lewis Edwards around Aberdeen, several Tom Harpers, one of whom is a city team footballer and so will dominate most search results, and even Eric Banks is also the name of an American football player, so again there's lots of distracting results.
By all means, continue digging for stuff, just please be wary about doxxing people because there will almost certainly be intentional misdirection and unrelated people sharing the same name. You might also be alerting them to their slip-ups, giving them time to fabricate a cover story.
It also might be interesting to discover their friends, family and work social network, but that should only be in the context of finding other avenues to discover more - and remember that most likely any acquaintances you do find will almost certainly not personally be involved with any scam that's occurring.
Fair points. But once you factor in that VeloxMedia's services were moved and hosted on Benthost's servers at some point, and Benthost is owned by Shield Management, the dots start connecting.
Well, they told us there was a DDoS. We don't actually know if that was true or not, maybe they were even deliberately simulating packet loss themselves.
All we actually know is that the DDoS certainly helped their narrative. They turned up here saying they wanted to cancel all the cheap plans without a refund. Then they claimed there was a DDoS which meant "Eric" was too busy to answer our questions. And then conveniently LET was the cause of the DDoS (for reasons that were never explained) and only LET plans got cancelled. But LET was their primary avenue for offering deals, so that's still basically almost everyone.
The DDoS may be true because it's hard to understand what goes through the minds of the guys that do that, but honestly I can't see anyone wasting their resources on such a small provider in the midst of an exit scam. What would they gain from it?
Contact your bank proactively, tell them you think your card details have been compromised and ask for a new card. Unless you do this very regularly, no bank will take issue with this, as they are responsible for any losses if they don't.
Or just be an adult and go to your account remove it and if there is an issue ask them to remove it.
Aside from the name of Benthost, which should be an immediate red flag to anyone seeing it, there are several entities with that name. What's clear is that the website has only existed for a couple of months and clearly hastily thrown together. It's so poorly done, it seems almost intentional as a statement "you've gotta know you've already been screwed over."
Shield Management is another of those names that's hard to track down. I've been out of that space for years, but in the early 2000s there were literally hundreds of companies with very similar names providing services for small one-man consultancies. I haven't even bothered researching this route myself because of that, but happy to know it's showing some leads.
If that were the case, how would you explain the US filings? That Lewis registered new entities as owned by other existing companies without them knowing?
Didn't lewis explained he lived in us before uk? That would match all previous missleadings