In 2006 Xtream purchased two safelist submitters from Ed Pires - Yourtechmall.org and Vortexportals.com. Along with the submitter script itself, we also purchased life time permissions to submit to the thousands of safelists in those submitters. We then discovered the following:
Ed Pires did NOT have rights to sell the scripts we purchased.
Ed Pires sold us lifetime permissions to safelists which did NOT belong to him.
Ed Pires sold us lifetime permissions to safelists that in fact did not exist.
Ed Pires sold us lifetime permissions to safelists that in 2008 no longer exist, or have become disabled, or inactive.
In the Vortex Mega Submitter, we paid for 5,000 lists - he never delivered 5,000 lists. At one time that submitter did house 3500 lists. Of the 3500 lists, hundreds did not belong to him. Of the balance remaining - lists that actually did belong to them at one time - we found only a handful of active, valid, working lists that allowed the members to actually send email to the members. There were plenty in the database belonging to Ed where a member could join, but all that happened after that is they got spammed by Ed Pires. The member could never send an email out themselves.
Xtream had issues in the first few months of obtaining the submitters. Xtream PAID Ed Pires to fix and correct those issues. Ed Pires PROMISED for over a year to have issues fixed. Several times we gave his technician access to our servers to go in and work on those scripts. The submitters were NEVER corrected. We recently discovered that the reason for this is that he had in fact pirated those scripts from the rightful owner and that the scripts had encoding in them which Ed - and any technician that might have worked for him - could not touch. We then discovered that Ed Pires NEVER had a technician at all, meaning we paid him (again) for nothing.
All total, Xtream paid out over $2200.00 to Ed Pires for scripts and permissions, all through Paypal, for nothing. Unfortunately, paypal only goes back 2 months and the serious issues and then later disclosures happened after the 2 month period for refund. That $2200 does not include hosting.
We hosted with Ed Pires for about 7 months. Except for the first month, we were continually denied access to cpanel which meant we could not manage our sites and many domains. There were numerous times in which we sent Ed extra money - above and beyond our contracted server costs - simply to get our cpanel access turned back on. He told us it was because Cpanel had turned us off. Truth was: his own SERVER HOST was denying us access because ED had not paid his bills with them.
When we moved our domains to another server and hosting services in 2007 - Ed contacted us wanting more money for member access to the safelists. We asked him to please correct the ongoing issues before asking for more money for anything. He promised to fix the issues only if we paid him to do so. We did. He gave us dates when the submitters would be fixed. They weren't. At one time he told us that the technician had gone into our servers and fixed the submitters. That was not true. He promised AGAIN to fix them. He did not. We did get refunds from paypal on those incidents. Unfortunately it was too late to get our $2200 refunded from the original purchases.
2008 Ed Pires seems to have dismantled many of his businesses, yet some domains of his continue to send out spam email. If you find any of his services: buyer beware.
Xtream will be implementing solutions to the online submitters at yourtechmall.org and vortexportals.com in 2008.