I hope everyone is well, I have a client who has stopped taking my calls, ignoring my emails/invoices
This has been dragging over a year now receiving bits and pieces of payments
I’m now so fed up! I had taken the website down numerous times but because the hosting/cpanel belongs to them they probably got someone to log in via cPanel to remove my account in WordPress and reinstate the website (I should have seen this coming I now feel stupid) my account has been removed and I have no access to the website
My work is live and I guess this person just moves on using work that hasn’t been paid for! I’ve sent messages, I’ve called, I’ve emailed. In all my years of freelancing, I have never come across such a situation
Please help how can I handle this?
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I’d cut my losses and move on. In the future get a third up front, another third at a mutually agreed upon milestone, and a third at completion.
If you can send them an email through a lawyer
Assuming you have a written contract, detailing what they owe and when it was due, there’s always the option of taking them to court. Whether it’s worth it depends on how much lost revenue there is, whether they’re big enough that they have more/better lawyers than you, and so on.
(Chances are, it’s not worth it.)
If you didn’t have a contract with clear milestones and payment terms, you will next time. 🤣 Yes, it sucks that you have to do this extra work when 90 percent of clients are reasonable adults, but that other 10 percent, hoo boy…
About the only thing you can do is send them to collections. You may not get paid but their credit rating will take a hit. The other option is small claims court but that could cost you money out of pocket as well as your time.
This is not legal advice, but in the event nothing gets resolved through reasonable means, there’s always the chance that by some wp vulnerability the site were to go down, wink and wink.
Firstly, that sucks. Hopefully you have some sort of contract in place? If not, make sure there is one in place in future, and only do work on a staging environment that you own until payment has been made in full (then you can push the changes over to the live site).
Secondly, you have absolutely no right to take their website down when you don’t have anything to do with their hosting account. That’s likely grounds on their part to also take legal action against you if it’s deemed to be malicious or if it had an effect on their business (regardless of them not paying you). Don’t do that if you’re not the one paying for the hosting, and then even on your own server you should have something in the contract that states that “failure to pay will result in services being terminated…” or something to that effect.
I would roll back my work or restore a backup to before you started. If it’s important to them, they’ll pay to have it restored