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Here is a snapshot of an Elance interaction between Adevox/Twenty and a client.

Notice that the rating at the time, in their heyday, was 40%. This is abysmally low. Any supplier on Elance who has a rating of below 75% ought to be stuck off!

Another clue is that of the 203 clients at the time, only 40 returned. In other words, 163 ran away! Follow the crowd and run. One could say that 163 people simply did not need any more work. Any web-based project is an on-going situation. Instead of ripping off 163 clients, why not serve them well. Imagine how much richer these men would be if they could have maintained 163 clients. The add-on, and flow-on effects would have made them rich.

Alin and Cristian are bad news. Their companies Adevox/Twenty are also bad news. But they will change their name and strike again.

Adevox/Twenty might argue that their low ratings were due to picky or fussy customers. What a rotten bit of luck that of all the clients on Elance, they attracted the bad ones. This is too hard to believe.

Here is an example of a company that has this year made over $146,000. And in their lifetime on Elance, they have made $792,628. And they have a 95% rating. Now that’s the way to run a business! Work for it. Earn it. Don’t lie and cheat and con everyone. And we mean everyone.

They con their employees, their suppliers, their staff, their government (see blogs below about Alin and Cristian owing huge amounts to their government), and they con their society by not paying taxes, and they con and cheat clients, and they con and cheat Elance by finding clients on line and then taking the work off line. From this we can only assume they con and cheat each other in their personal and private lives. Imagine their friends and families. How hurt they must feel when they are let down by these men. Read below about rumours of a certain person cheating on his wife. Gosh, if you can cheat the one person whom you say you love above all else, who would you not cheat?

Lessons:

1) Never work with anyone on Elance with such low ratings.

2) Always rate people with whom you work so that others can benefit form your experience. And always rate honestly! Otherwise we all suffer.

3) Never go off line and deal outside of Elance. The savings are not worth it. Elance protects you with full escrow.

4) Never make part payments. Only after the job is done, should you release the funds. That’s what Elance is all about. They have processed over US$200 million. The system works. Stay within the system. Sure, they take a commission from the provider. But that’s not how to look at it. They provide an exceptional service in this globalised world where con artists and scammers and fraudsters like Alin Chiriac and Cristian Mihai can now harm more people in more countries. Unfortunately, although Elance makes trading global, there is no system that makes the legal framework global, and this suits con men. They can con you from the other side of the world, and you become too exhausted to do anything about it. And you would not have the money and the knowledge to lodge complaints etc.

Wouldn’t it be great if laws were universal, and courts were simple.

Tell us your stories. Write to us at TwentyScam@Hotmail.co.uk and keep those bits of information coming. Every small amount is useful so that we can protect others from being conned by these two men.

Every day, someone steps forward with a horror story about Twenty or Adevox, owned by Cristian Mihai and Alin Chiriac of Romania.

Often, the victims are too ashamed about what happened to them. They tend to blame themselves for what happened, because they feel that they should have been less trusting. Such is the nature of con-artists and scammers. They present a charming image, to set you at your ease, and then, when you least expect it, you are bitten.

Here is a summary of yet another victim. This one had no problems with us sharing the story publicly. This person is perusing other avenues. The victim writes:

“Basically I joined Elance.com and created a project in which Adevox gave me the best bid. They asked for US$1000 up-front. I thought it was unusual that I paid up-front instead of through milestones but I spoke to Cristian a few times online and on the phone and he made me feel that it was safe. Shortly after beginning the project I could see that they didn’t have the qualifications but they were trying… It was strange to me because Elance has to qualify you to become a provider and Adevox had done $200,000 of work with other clients that didn’t post complaints. After 4 months of very poor work I threatened to cancel the project and asked for my money back which they declined. I was in talks with them up until 2 weeks ago. Now they don’t respond at all. I had a feeling he was going to open a new account with Elance. So I decided to Google their names and this is where I ran into your blog… I then contacted Elance. I will write to you soon and tell you about that!”

We have been in contact with this victim and we are exchanging information. More worms are popping out of cans. Stat tuned!

When will Mihai and Chiriac grow up. They cannot treat people like this. They owe money to many people including programmers and staff, as well as clients. Their behaviour is totally unacceptable, and we will continue to bring news about these men until they pay what they owe and stop their criminal and unethical behaviour. We have all the time in the world and heaps of resources and money and victims to feed us. The snowball is rolling and it is picking up momentum.

It is a simple rule in life: hurt enough people, and they will rise up!

It was bad enough that Alin Chiriac and Cristian Mihai took the money and never delivered. One client who was ripped-off complained that Adevox and Twenty, owned by these two con men, developed a site for him. Although everything was a disaster, and he never got what he paid for, the site is somewhat up, even though nothing works.

Well, it’s bad enough that the site is totally off brief and completely useless, it has one hidden feature: when visitors press the ‘Contact Us’ section, their information goes to a staff member @Adevox.com

The client has no idea who this person is. The client was complaining that for nine months, not a single contact or lead or message has come via the web site — the very web site that was a total disaster, produced by Alin and Cristian’s incompetent company. So the client paid a consultant to look into the site’s programming and it was found that any and all mail for any of the business request forms, were going back to Adevox.

That is one sneaky underhanded miserable trick. Goodness knows how many visitors had submitted requests. We have no idea how those requests were handled. No one knows what happened to the requests.

So not only do these fraudsters steal your money and ruin your business, they also have the bloody audacity to place a hidden program inside the site to steal leads.

The bloody cheek!

P.S. It has been pointed out to us that this could have been an innocent mistake, or just an address used for testing. It might well have been. But the end result is that the poor client had not received, and to this day cannot receive any mail. So he has had to appoint a new programmer at more expense. It might not have been the original programmer’s fault. But the company is at fault for not paying attention to these important elements. If indeed this is a common thing to do (to place a staff member’s email during the testing phase) then equally it would have been well known that such a feature needs to be turned off as soon as possible, so they cannot say that they forgot. If it is common, then it is not unusual, and so there must be a system in place. That system was never activated and the client had no workable site, yet Alin Chiriac and Cristian Mihai have 100% perfect money. If you are going to take perfect money, you had better pay attention and deliver to the client. How would they like it if all the money the clients paid them just vanished because the money was imperfect. It would be unthinkable to give someone money that does not work. Well, then, don’t dish out web sites that do not work (in this case, the site did not work, and it was 100% off the brief, and we have documents to prove it to anyone who want to so much as breath in this direction)!

Their names are rather common. There are many people whose name happens to be Cristian Mihai or Alin Chiriac.

Google lists 2,640 and Yahoo lists 1,360 hits for Alin Chiriac. Whereas Cristain Mihai comes up 37,000 and 83,300 on Google and Yahoo.

So as not to confuse who’s who, we thought to show you some photos. If you have any other photos to share with us, please send them to TwentyScam@Hotmail.co.uk.

Please note that the new home for this blog is at www.SpeakUpNow.Biz where all the updates are located. See you there.