New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
That sounds great as a guess, however we don't need to guess - on his 5th post on LET, within a couple of hours of his first post, he stated his intention to cancel all the cheap services.
Sure, I don't believe for one minute it would be free. He does keep claiming that though.
Also with his claims of how much money he has for this project, the cost of maintaining those 3000 customers is insignificant.
Nothing about what Eric has done makes sense in terms of what his stated objectives are. It literally only make sense as phase 2 of the exit scam started by Lewis.
Buying a service with a few thousand users on, and then kicking most of them off the service makes no sense. You might as well start a new company from scratch. Treating customers they way he's done means the company's name is ruined. You might as well start a new company from scratch. The only thing that make sense is phase 2 of the exit scam - convincing people to write off the losses from phase 1 without doing a chargeback, and the sweetener on top - getting them the pay another $4/m each. It's just double dipping the scam pot.
Why is he telling customers that their service will be cancelled, to chargeback to Lewis and then flagging them as fraud? That is simply designed to punish those who chargeback, because that's reducing the success of his phase 1. He's already said he's cancelling those services anyway, if he's not involved in the exit scam, it wouldn't make any difference about them charging back to Lewis or not.
So, I agree, letting the original operation go belly up would have been better for everyone. At least people could chargeback without Eric destroying their ability to purchase things in the future. The only person it's not good for is Eric / Lewis, because they wouldn't be able to double dip in the scam.
FYI: I will not respond to "you defended him" nonsense anymore.
Simple: when I know something for sure I talk about facts, when I do not know for sure but have indications I talk about my guess.
I - and most others here - do not know for sure what Eric's intentions were but there are indicators like e.g. providing support even during Christmas, hence I guess.
Idk nor care. But I think @DP, or whoever banned @VeloxMedia should have closed this thread both for reasons of fairness and to avoid the shit-pile getting even bigger without any chance to improve the outcome for us LET users.
"I didn't steal the money, I just borrowed it!" the thief said ...
As for "didn't got cancelled yet" you might be right, I guess the probability that my VPS will be up and running for the full period I paid in advance is low; my guess, which might be wrong, is that I'll be asked to pay after the first year has passed.
But be that as it may, even if my VPS was canceled tomorrow I'd be a bit unhappy but not make a fuss. Reason: it was MY decision to trust Lewis and to pay 3 years in advance, he didn't push me in any way, so why should I hold Eric, about whose existence I didn't know yet back then, accountable or consider him responsible for my decision?
And there is an additional factor: I have a decent understanding of hosting but didn't check Lewis properly. Plus there were warning signs in the form of IMO obviously untenable promos. Maybe "I should have known" would be a bit too much but if I'm not gravely mistaken re. the dates and order of events I could have known.
So, if looking for who's guilty I can't but recognize that I myself am co-responsible for the deal I made potentially going belly-up!
Hence I'm grateful that Eric, who AFAIK is under no obligation to do so, at least seemed to have the good will to keep our VPSs alive (in the beginning) and even now seems to keep quite a few VPS alive for some yet unknown period of time.
So, from my POV Eric - without any obligation AFAIK - softens the outcome of my, as I now know, bad decision. So, for what/why should I be angry at him?
IF said provider got the payments made (pro-rata)! I can't say for sure but it seems Lewis kept the money. So, why the hell should Eric refund money he didn't receive?
Also: Eric pretty much invited everyone to initiate a chargeback. All he asked was to inform him beforehand.
Bad comparison, that's not what happened. To stay in your comparison what happened is that say, Elon Musk took your money but his rocket didn't even reach orbit - and then - say Nasa, took over. Obviously you can't expect Nasa to refund you $3.50 because Elon Musk over-promised and kept the money.
--- at this point I stopped reading and hence responding.
Have a nice weekend everyone
No, he threatened to mark all chargebacks as fraud which, if they are not his customers, he does not have the right to do. By handling peoples' finances and marking chargebacks as fraud, he is acting as if those are his customers.
His behavior was and is quite poor. Whether or not his actions are legal shouldn't even factor into this. Just because something is legal does not automatically make it moral (and conversely, just because something is illegal does not automatically make it immoral). Even if he truly has the legal right to do everything he is doing, it does not invalidate the community's criticisms at all.
First and foremost, it seems you are
unable to identify the facts:1. Eric want to
help the existing customer, but keptbackpedaling. 140 minutes from his first post, he made decision to cancel those who chargeback.Zero cred, zero face2. Eric
attitude and temperament problem persists(unprofessional), even beyond the first week where he allegedly sleep only 4 hours a day.3. Eric made
no effort to make new binding contract, until he decide to charged existing customer who hadn't made chargeback, subscription fees. Essentially leaving the customer's running service on his whimwithout any repercussion.because Lewis and Eric are the same person and so is the VeloxMedia.
Legally we purchased vps from Velox Media and not Lewis/Eric/Tom etc (before the so-called fake acquisition in December). that's what the invoice and reciepts shows the name.
Nobody cares who was old owner or who is new as we dealt with "Velox Media" which later started threatning and blackmailing its customers.
Velox Media thus started a scam and they were quite successfull in scaming LET users untill the users came to know and then the mods banned them!
I don't believe they are the same person. Even their writing styles were different, as were the way they handled matters in private in tickets. I think others here have also found evidence that they are different people.
I witnessed the diversity of humanity.Again.
Popcorn...
"i stopped reading have a good weekend" - any bets on how long til hes back? Sounding more like lewerictomdrew by the day, tbh.
He's waaay too calm to be Eric.
well, that doesn't makes much difference. I bough from Velox Media. thats it. Now who is running this scam operation IDK their names. If it was Lewis (exit scam) and Eric (new owner with more scam) then both of the owerns are terrible.
I agree. They both bear responsibility for what has transpired.
Nobody wins in this scam. The previous owner of Veloxmedia will probably lose more than expected due to a large number of dispute charge back. The owner now received a bad brand with no trust to individual customers. Those customers who paid for a yearly plan is now getting cancelled (or pay extra fee if they still trust Veloxmedia).
Only the providers of those hosting bare metal servers earned from this scam. And of course Stripe and PayPal earned some from transaction and dispute fee.
customers better chargeback and chargeback hard.
I hear you, but legally there is no separation between VeloxMedia and Lewis as he was/is a sole trader.
Get your timeline right please.
I think the 5th post of "Eric" is about terminating plans/accounts. Almost the first thing after his "introduction" he is basically saying "Lewis is gone, we don't respect any contracts and we don't see you as customers".
Also the threaths against this site are from Boxing day; within a week. Read the threaths and try to look independantly to it. More than enough for a ban. And if you really think we let the mods believe something, go to LES and see what's happening there: same behaviour and an even quicker ban.
Explain this to me if you believe "Eric" and what he said about "Lewis is gone, we have no control over the payment methods". If that's really so, why does he have to do what he had done? Explain me why it'd be "illegal" to keep on hosting people?
The real illegal thing already happened, but he wouldn't believe that. He violeted (and is still violating) laws in quite a number of countries he's doing business in. That started exactly the moment "he got the keys".
By accepting the keys he accepted what was in it. And if he didn't look into it properly before, it's his fault - if he didn't get the chance he should have walked away from the deal. If you got someone in a back-alley offering you a "perfectly good kitchen knife set" for $10, and you buy it without looking into the package and it turns out to be covered in blood and use for a few killings, what do you think the police's response is?
The source has silenced itself. Well, the source even did say a couple of times in this thread that he was leaving but came back before the blink of an eye. But that's the pattern: saying one thing, changing the story, doing someting else. Talk about professionalism.
Good that is was YOUR decision. Now it was "Eric's" decision to get involved in all this. That's why you can/should hold "Eric" responsible of everything from the moment he got the keys. It was his decision to accept the keys with everything in the car - i.e. the customers.
And even when he was not expecting "the mess" he found out, communication and choose of words is key. And boy, that went wrong very quickly. When you know the laws and you give someone like "Eric" a suggestion that some things aren't going right and you get the response (over and over again) that "he knows better and you are wrong", even when pointing out the legal sources, there comes a moment I respond with "if you know it all, you should prepare for the consequences".
There is where we fundamentally differ opinion. Mine is: "you accepted the keys, you have obligations". Otherwise you shouldn't have accepted the keys until the moment you feel comfortable with it. And would that mean that maybe all VPSes would become unavailable and deleted? Maybe - but then everyone would look at Lewis, be angry with him. You know, the one who is really at fault. But by accepting the keys, "Eric" got himself involved.
Mine is: "you accepted the keys, you have obligations".
While I agree I think the most missed point of this whole topic is this:
The Infra was prepaid by money from the money of existing customers for undisclosed length. I am 100% sure the infra deals were not expiring on the exact date when Eric took over veloxmedia which means he started to manage property of others for his own agenda and profit without any rights to do so.
I mean at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what Eric thinks his obligations are, he's acting in the most customer-antagonistic way possible.
The users had a contract with whoever was behind the Lewis / Tom Harper personae, and was trading under the brand Veloxmedia. It doesn't matter if that was a company, sole trader or whatever, the entire value of that brand came from the customers trusting it and paying for a service.
For whatever reason, scam or legitimate, if Lewis decided that he didn't want to continue running the service, that's one matter. There are 2 customer friendly options here - cancel all the services and refund everyone, or sell all the services to someone who will continue the services as-is.
Eric claims what actually happened was a third option, and Lewis has never stated anything contrary, and so Eric has bought all the positive parts of the business (i.e. all the assets and reputation that came from people paying for the service) and none of the obligation to run that service. However, there are several reasons why this seem not to be the case from a legal point of view.
It is possible to do this, but Lewis would be stupid to agree to it as he would still have the commitment to run the service, and chargebacks are inevitable. Not only is Eric encouraging people to charge back (which lends weight to his claim that he's not related), he's actively reporting anyone who does so as fraud. This completely destroys his claims - as he'd be neither legally privy to that information nor have any valid basis for claiming a fraud.
Secondly, he's obtained all the customer data and continued to run the services for a period. If his claim that he's not obligated to provide service, then both he and Lewis (assuming they are separate people) have broken the laws around data protection in doing so. And by virtue of keeping the servers alive at all rather than shutting them down shows acceptance of those obligations, and by then attempting to extort the customer base for a monthly fee, he's showing both that he considers these his customers not Lewis', further showing that he always did have an obligation to support them.
The problem Eric has placed himself in, if he is genuinely not part of this scam, is that he hasn't chosen either "these are my customers and obligations" or "these are not my customers and obligations". He keeps switching between these 2 possibilities to suit whatever he's trying to justify at that moment.
Again, if you take the alleged sale at face value, only he and Lewis can know the truth of what was in their agreement. But Eric's actions are self-contradictory and don't match either of those outcomes, and done so in a way that only makes sense if he was complicit in the scam.
And regardless of all that, whatever was arranged between him and Lewis, and even if he isn't involved in the exit scam, it doesn't change the fact that both his and Lewis' actions have broken UK and EU data protection laws.
Exactly true. Nobody knows the detail of that acquisition but all the facts show that the acquisition only involved assets but did not involve debts. How could this be allowed by taking over only the assets and throwing all the debts away?
This is actually possible normally. A failing business can sell whatever parts it thinks it can sell during a liquidation in an attempt to repay its debts. Generally, customers getting refunds is quite low in the order of debts that get repaid. However, this situation only normally occurs when a company is in liquidation, because it sells what it can and then declares itself bankrupt. Because a company has limited liability, the directors only loose whatever assets the company owned and the value of the shares they owned. In Lewis' case, there was no company, so he (assuming his real identity can be identified) is personally liable to repay any and all debts, even after the sale of the assets, unless he himself is personally bankrupt. That means selling his PS5, selling his house, selling his car, selling his PC, everything, until he has nothing left, and only then can he declare bankruptcy. This is why, when your service gets cancelled you should chargeback.
For this purpose, it doesn't really matter if we can identify Lewis or not. You dispute the charge with paypal, stripe or your bank, and it's their problem to deal with. When they start losing money repaying what they've already paid out into his bank, then they'll be in a position to track down who he actually is. And they will want to, because short of denying legitimate chargebacks which would be a PR nightmare for them, they'll end up losing quite a lot. When they do go down this route, that is just a matter for them and Lewis. We'll not know the outcome of that.
It's quite possible, Lewis and Eric are both who they say they are. If Eric is telling the truth about the deal, then there's no other way of saying it, but he screwed Lewis over big time. But again, if you believe all the evidence, Lewis was part of a entrepreneurial mentorship program, and so really if he decided to have a final blow out sale over several months, then withdraw all that money, and think he'd be free of obligation by handing over the business to Eric for nothing, then he clearly never bothered speaking to his mentors, he's stupid, they're stupid, or both.
But again, if that were true, Eric wouldn't have taken the actions he did. He'd have just taken "the keys to the kingdom", shut all the servers down, taken whatever it was of value he saw (thinking IP addresses, hardware, active contracts that he wanted), and closed down the business. There's no reason for him to have ever bothered keeping the servers running, unless that was part of his agreement with Lewis. And he'd have had no legal right to have any customer details, unless he was taking over the obligations of the contracts.
So while it is possible to buy the assets of a failing company and not the obligations, none of Eric's or Lewis' actions support that.
Great essay @ralf , A+ ! Keep up the good work.
@ralf managed to make a very good TL;DR which will help customers trying to complain here when they see their services down. Thank you @ralf for taking the time.
Really nice synopsis @ralf. I'm surprised how many people still think Eric buying "Velox" means he is in some way required to continue their services. While it makes no business sense that he would buy the company and treat customers that way, it is completely possible that he has the legal right to do so. We will likely never have enough information to understand all the layers of this scam.
Customers should be more important than hardware. When hardware becomes more important than customers, the business is gone. In this case Eric allegedly bought the hardware without the customers, establishing the priority of what's important straight from the get-go.
And conversely, he's got all the free hardware in the world, so why would he buy Velox for the hardware?
If I may add, sole trader has unlimited liability. Better explanation about unlimited liability could be found on Lloyd's "Names".
Also shorter version of conflicting moves:
Lewis if you're reading this I want you to know that I'd be interested in reading the actual story some day, even if it's tame compared to our theories. Feel free to drop me a note privately from any of your personalities.
Yeah, also the point I didn't mention is that technically Lewis couldn't have transferred the contracts in the legal sense, because as a sole trader those contracts are irrevocably with him.
What he could (and should) have done is male a deal with Eric, such that he appointed Eric to service all aspects of those contracts on his behalf, and for Eric to provide indemnity against any legal action (including chargebacks) resulting from that.
But given that if we are to believe the reddit post only 2 days before Eric took over, I doubt Lewis would have had the sense or time to get a lawyer to draft this in any way that would hold water, in which case he's still liable for every contract he made.
So, in that sense, Eric might not legally have taken on those obligations, but in that case he'd be illegally accessing EU and UK customer data by keeping the servers running and keeping the customer's PII, and also committing fraud himself by monitoring Lewis' stripe transactions and reporting his customers as fraud whenever they chargeback. He's probably also committing fraud by en-masse claiming that all these servers are overdue on payment as well when he knows full well the recipients aren't his customers and they already paid in full.
They're going to make a movie about it in 20 years time