I'm a person who naturally gives people the benefit of the doubt, to my loss sometimes but there is something about this story that doesn't add up. i want the people on SOT to see my first email to her and the reply. See below. If she had payment issues how come she responded the way she did saying she has no problem paying in advance? My plan was to give her the benefit of the doubt and take one order only while we set up the pre pay system. What makes me upset about this situation is on 2/22 she says she can prepay. i say fine, if you'll agree to prepay then we'll do this one now before getting paid as long as a check is sent immediately and then all future orders are prepay for a couple months. She says she is fine with that. She tells me a check for $400 was mailed and that will cover several future orders. i'm thinking, great, a prepay client is a good client and i could use another good client right now. During that several day period of waiting for the $400 to arrive we did more orders but the check doesn't arrive so i tell her. Then she asks how to pay me with paypal, i tell her, she acts like she tries several time but can't figure it out. i ask her to pay with wire transfer, she says ok, tries several times but can't get that to work either (people wire to us all the time, it works...). i have my personal banker contact her directly via email and she doesn't respond to him. Then she sends a credit card info that has no money on it. in the meantime she's sending orders almost every day and we are doing them. I finally understand this is a game and i just lost at it. 

Question for Deana: did the $400 check get lost in the mail as you told me or was it never sent because you already knew you had no money? you were pretending to be trying to send payment via check, paypal, wire transfer, credit card. i just can't believe at this point that you actually tried paying me through 4 different ways and it just wouldn't work while you had the money and then all of a sudden you didn't have the money. It seems clear that you didn't have the money to begin with. At leat you didn't have enough money to prepay so why tell me you have no trouble prepaying?

I also know the pain of not getting paid. In the 11 years of running this company we have had to pay more money that i want to share to abstractors for orders that we never got paid for. It is a part of doing business in this industry unfortuately. If you are going to vend orders be prepared to eat it now and then. A lot of people missed this lesson in life somehow but it's not ok to send work to someone and then not pay them for it PERIOD. Last year we got burned by Cliff Branham owner of Cornerstone Title of Lexington over $58,000. We filed suit and won a judgment for over that amount (public record) but it cost me another $2,000 in legal fees and they filed BK and we won't get anything. We lost thousands from other clients as well. It nearly put us out of business. it was hard. we could have just not paid the 100 plus abstractors who did this work to ease the pain but we didn't. We paid every single dollar to the abstractors for those orders as the people here on SOT can testify. That money came out of my pocket. If you are going to continue in this industry you need to be able to withstand some hits by setting money aside and planning for it. Yes, plan for not getting paid. If you can't do that get out now and stop ripping off poeple like us please. Here is my first email corespondence with Deana.

Hi Nathan - actually can you tell me who wrote that about us..We have paid all of our bills in full for abstractions.  I do, however, have no problem with paying in advance...I would, however, still like to obtain your fees and turn around time as well as states.

 

Thanks so much.

 

Deana

Deana Moore, Owner

21st CENTURY NATIONAL ABSTRACTION CO.

847 Turtles Place

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina  29576

Phone:  803-287-8830

Email:  deanatwentyfirst@aol.com

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Nathan Miller <nathan@docret.com>
To: deanatwentyfirst <deanatwentyfirst@aol.com>
Sent: Tue, Feb 22, 2011 2:18 am
Subject: FW: FEES, TURN AROUND AND STATES COVERED

Hi Deana,

 

We are available for additional clients but there is a concern about your payment practices that we found on an abstractor forum. The warning alleges that you didn’t pay for services and then would not return the calls when the abstractor tried to collect. What is your payment policy and are you willing to prepay in the beginning?

 

Thanks,

Nathan

 

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