Complaint Review: James Livesley

We went on Austin Craigslist to find someone to help us build a website. A British designer named James Livesley offers classes and web design support. He sells himself as a jack of all trades regarding teaching web design and developing websites. We took a couple of classes from him and realized how hard it was to code a website. After 4 classes, we decided to pay him to do a website for our company. What a salesman! He has an extensive portfolio of websites he says he has build but unfortunately, we did not check his references enough in detail. None of his websites are active. Not checking his references was our big mistake. Our second mistake was that he insists that he needs to be paid in cash because he does not have a immigration work visa. We our not sure if he even legally allowed to be in the US. He said he was not supposed to be working while immigration was processing his application. Red flag number 2. Unfortunately, we paid him over $4,000 dollars cash over a 12 month period. He was late to every meeting, rarely returned phone calls/emails, work never got done on time and because our company needed a website so desperately, we kept accepting his lies of non-completion. Our company started calling him so we could get our money back and after 20 non answered emails and 40 non returned phone calls we gave up. Our company ended up taking his unfinished work to a professional web design company and they saw a copy of his work and pretty much said it was worthless. His website coding was copied bits and pieces from other websites. He made a complete mess of our unfinished website. Our new web developer was unable to use any of his code and told us we paid for garbage. We had to start all over again. We went to an attorney and because we did not have a contract or receipts for payment, we were SOL. James Livesley is a British conman that runs an Austin CraigList ad every month under the lessons section. Beware! He is only running a CASH scam. Go with a reputable web design company that you can hold accountable. James Livesley cost our company 12 months of headaches and $4,000 we will never get back. He runs a CraigsList ad titled "Adobe CS6 tutoring photoshop, flash, most design software & General. You can find his info and picture under Linkedin under James Livesley, Independent Online Media Profession. Beware of this con artist in Austin Texas.