Offline customer charges back and Paypal takes $250

I learn a new lesson everyday, but this one has been painful. I contacted a potential offline client on Craigslist on January 30. I actually made a screen capture video with his ad on the screen and talked about what I could do for him. That same day, a Sunday, he emailed me back and said that my response to him was the most professional out of the 300 he had received, but he did not think he could afford my services.

We went back and forth about pricing and what I was willing to offer. He needed 2 sites, but he could only pay $500 he said. So, I told him that I was willing to design a theme (Artisteer) and build him a site for $250 BUT he would need to add his own content and pages. I told him I would even make him a training video showing him how to create the pages/posts. He said okay.

I start to work on the site and he starts emailing me tons of images and a header he had created by someone. It had buttons embedded so I had to ask a techy friend to re-code it to make it work on a Wordpress site. About 2 days later, I had it ready, made his training video and sent it over. He calls me up surprised that I had not written content and added it. I reminded him of our agreement and pointed him back to the emails. He says ok and I don't hear from him again. He immediately changes the password on the site.

Fast forward over a month to yesterday. I wake up to find my Paypal account is $250 less and now negative. I also have email from Paypal, so I call them. They said he paid via credit card and did a charge back as "item not described". They now have to fight with his cc company on my behalf. I explain the whole deal and send them all of the emails, the initial video I made and the last video showing my work. He is still using the site and has even added content since then. His business was failing, so I think he just wanted to get some money back and figured he could steal it from me.

This just makes me so angry because I did the work in good faith and some people just want to steal from you I guess. Has anyone had this happen to them and what was the outcome?

What really irks me is that I have 3 kids to feed and this is a lot of money for me right now, so I hope that I have provided enough evidence to Paypal that the credit card company can see through this guy's shenanigans.

Funny thing was that he claims MY ad was misleading... Uh, dude YOU are the one who placed an ad! I did not place an ad.... Idiot. Plus, he would not allow me to create the template. He sent me HIS template and then told my husband on the phone (my hubby called him and did not say who he was- so he called back and was confronted in a nice way and then hung up LOL) that the site was "crap". It was HIS design! If it looked like crap, that was on him. Crazy.....

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