- Report: #1299659
Complaint Review: CHECKS AND BALANCES INC - Chicago Illinois
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CHECKS AND BALANCES INC
1050 N. State Street, Suite 301 Chicago, 60610 Illinois, USA
Phone:
312 329 9244
Web:
http://www.balance-me.com
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CHECKS AND BALANCES, INC Katherine Gilbert Racked up a bill for services then refused to pay. Chicago Illinois
In January 2013 Katherine E. Gilbert along with her investor Mark S. Rogers encountered a critical failure of computer systems in their office that were setup by a former employee. The equipment was setup years ago without documentation using a relatively obscure Linux virtualization technology and did not have any backups available.
On January 28th 2013 Katherine E. Gilbert, on behalf of Checks and Balances, Inc. executed a service agreement through DocuSign.com to have us perform services to attempt to have their data recovered. DocuSign.com is the same digital contract service used by big companies like Comcast to have customers sign up for internet service. The work requestd required first conducting a discovery phase whereby our team would be charged with documenting the infrasctructure in the office consisting of multiple servers and a network storage device. This was complicated by the fact that this equipment appeared to have suffered multiple power failures and would no longer function properly.
The contract for the work specified an estimate and noted that due to the complexity of the recovery there would be invoices sent weekly. A $300 deposit was provided by Checks and Balances per the agreement, by way of a business check. Due to the severity of the situation work began immediately.
On February 4th 2013 the payment made by Checks and Balances, Inc. was reversed by the bank for insufficient funds. We were charged a fee for depositing a bad check. Work on recovering the data ceased immediately upon notificaiton by the bank. At the time of work ceasing the project had been ongoing with multiple engineers working to recover the data. Documentation for the work done on the project to date was provided to Katherine E. Gilbert including credentials for all the computer equipment.
Checks and Balances, Inc. had acrued over $8000 USD in fees for the labor since the work began. We kept stopping back into the office to check on the payment. After several attempts we were able to pickup a $1,000.00 Cashiers Check on 2/12/13 from Katherine E. Gilbert.
Katherine E. Gilbert then claimed that we were pre-billing for work that had yet to be performed.
Katherine E. Gilbert then made further claims about not being satisfied by the work performed despite our documentation that the work was performed as requested in the contract.
Katherine E. Gilbert claimed she was fraudulently induced to sign the contract through DocuSign. A system that sends an email for each party to execute their portion of the agreement.
Katherine E. Gilbert then responded by calling us names.
We sent the matter to collections. We never got paid.
If you are considering doing business with Katherine E. Gilbert or Checks and Balances, Inc. you should be aware of the way they conduct business. It's understandable that with a company facing a crisis like this there could be cashflow problems. It's unfair, unethical, immoral and downright illegal to ignore your responsiblity as a business owner and to RIPOFF another company trying to help you stay in business.
Why post this years later? It's never sat well with me how we were treated. Hopefully others can make an educated decision now that this is on here.
1 Updates & Rebuttals
KATHERINE
CHICAGO,Illinois,
United States
FALSE COMPLAINT FILED
#2REBUTTAL Owner of company
Thu, July 12, 2018
In November 2012, my firewall and servers crashed due to the neglect of my IT adminitrator who I relied on for over 11 years. John was very smart and did a great job maintaining them until he fell under the influence of drugs and excessive drinking, I went through many IT consultants to rebuild the servers that ROBERT HALF SENT. I could not find an IT person to rebuild the servers. Lance Campbell was referred to me in January 2013 and was confident to rebuild the servers. He came one night and took a complete back up of my system, never was given that backup. I paid him $300 for that evening, he then switched my email and servers to chrome so that his system could have complete control. The next few days he was presenting me with an eleborate system that was going to cost me over $50,000. That was way out of my ballpark. I told Lance and he insisted that had to be done and demanded $7500 before anything to be done, leaving me out of business. When I realized he had control of my emails and domain, I called go dadddy and learned that I could control my domain and emails by paying godaddy annual fee, therefore, I switched my email and domain control back thru godaddy. That angered Lance because he loss control of my adminiistration. I refused his proposals and found someone else to get my servers working for less than $5000. In Lance anger, he billed me for the proposals and sent the billings to many different collection agencies only to be rejected as projected proposals and no proof of any work done. I learned a lot about IT management and how to better control the IT people. My business is successful for over 35 years because I am honest and fair to all my staff, customers , and vendors.
