Complaint Review: Anthony Horne

We are a major Hedge Fund that was looking to market our financial newsletter online. We do not understand this online space, so we were referred to Anthony Horne by a colleague. Perhaps the worst referral in our professional career. In fact the experience with this guy was so unbelievable that I am actually taking time to write and post this on ripoffreport to warn others and hopefully steer you away from this total fraud.
At first Mr. Horne is very nice and will tell you all you want to hear. However, once we hired him and began to communicate with him on a daily basis, we soon discovered that this guy is totally incompetent, irrational, illogical and completely uneducated.
He was hired to develop a simple online sales funnel that would automate lead generation and subscriptions to our newsletter. The day we received first drafts of his copywriting, we realized we made a massive mistake. His writing ability was literally at a 5th grade level. My office couldn’t believe the basic spelling and grammar errors he made. I literally had to completely rewrite all of his copy on every part of the project…he pitched us that he was able to write ‘clear hard hitting’ copy that would lead to converting sales.  The copy was anything but that. It was poorly written, many obvious mistakes and it was obvious that he copy/pasted most of it from another project he had worked on. Despite this disaster, we paid him and continued to move forward.
Upon completion of the project we began to market our newsletter via webinars and email campaigns. However we were receiving zero results…we hadn’t collected one email address or lead with multiple marketing efforts. Come to find out the entire sales funnel that Anthony supposedly built for us and was PAID in FULL for, was not operational and not functioning properly. None of it worked. Massive holes were discovered in this sales funnel that a novice programmer could have discovered immediately. It either works or it doesn’t… and Anthony claimed that it worked when he completed it. Later we found out that sales funnel, the payment processor, the membership plugin etc. etc., and everything else was not integrated with the expensive software ‘InfusionSoft’ we were subscribed too. Absolutely everything…  We couldn’t believe it.
At this point we gave Anthony the opportunity to fix all of his massive errors. He worked on this from April-July and could not fix the problems. During this process it was totally obvious that this guy is a total liar, fraud and has no idea what he is doing.
Anthony’s Excuses: This is where we discovered this guy is mentally imbalanced. He initially claimed that a random InfusionSoft employee went rogue…hacked into our InfusionSoft account and dismantled his work…He literally emailed us and told us that theory and he was adamant about it.  After a little time had passed, it’s almost as if he forgot about that theory that he was so adamant about and then offered us another theory. Excuse #2: he claimed that all our subscriptions had expired. So all the work he did was lost because of our lapsed subscriptions. We only have one subscription which was InfusionSoft a mandatory component to the entire funnel and we have been an active subscriber the entire time and continue to subscribe to this day. But he once again was adamant about that theory as well. Until several MONTHS later it’s as if Anthony actually forgot about the original 2 totally bogus theories/excuses and he actually apologized to us and semi-owned it. This didn’t make a difference because the project we Paid him in full and on schedule to develop never worked and despite other efforts and other programmers trying to figure out his coding mess…it still does not work to this day…17 months later.
I am not sure if we fired Anthony or if he just disappeared…but we were left with a totally useless inoperable sale funnel and we were out the $7k we had paid him. In order to protect our investment I attempted to work with Anthony and give him the opportunity to fix all his massive mistakes, but it was literally like dealing with a 4 year old. It is now 17 months later and we still do not have a functioning sales funnel, a project that could have easily been completed in 4 weeks by a reputable developer or digital marketing firm.
After some due diligence after the fact, we now know that Anthony Horne and Horne enterprises is a bankrupt organization. Anthony has no money, no resources and works out of his garage. We also discovered that other people in the industry have had horrible experiences with him as well. Unfortunately for Anthony, our firm is not going to get scammed by him. Our in-house counsel is going to slap a law suit on him. We are seeking to collect all fees, damages, operating costs etc. that will exceed $30k+. This is a suit in which he literally has no defense. Everything is documented and completely exposes him and his fraudulent ways.
I have left out a lot of detail and many other unbelievable issues we had with him. If I were to explain absolutely everything this guy said, did or didn’t do, this report would be 30 pages long.
PLEASE steer clear of this guy. Worst experience of our firm’s history.