What was suppose to be a simple few weeks WordPress site, turned into a nightmare for us.
Overview:
* We feel Cory Plock and his firm Prolifogy conned us of thousands of dollars, causing great damage and delaying the launch of a professional project we contracted Prolifogy to build. Prolifogy had a fraudulent programmer (according to their words) Bill on the project who did not deliver any usable code. Cory failed to manage the project and failed to audit the programmer for several months, even though this was suppose to be a small 5 week project. Then Corry tried to correct his failures by outsourcing to India and Puerto Rico, which also did not work out. Cory Plock's own skillsets were incapable of doing the coding, which surprised us because Cory Plock is an Expert Witness and is also a Computer Science adjunct professor at New York University.
We are shocked that a Court of Law would hear his testimony and interpret his word to be that of an expert, after what we've been through with him. We are also shocked that a prestigious school like NYU would allow someone like that to be near students, especially when Cory shared with us his future plans to recruit NYU students to be his programmers. Cory's behaviors and actions throughout the project were bizarre, absurd, and a little frightening at times... at one moment after he removed the first programmer and we generously gave him the opportunity to correct Prolifogy's issues,
Cory raised his voice in a 8/23/2011 phone call to a very shrill high-pitched whiny voice screaming "This isn't even worth it, this isn't even worth it," and then Cory hung up on our company. In that same phone call, Cory said that his wife told him she "wasn't happy with all the time he was putting into our project" to correct these issues (we believe his wife to be Lizette Plock of 1603 Eaton Ct in Danbury CT 06811 according to a public Cortera company search). Cory would often cut phone calls short saying he was at his son's soccer practice, rather than provide us with apologies, kindness, and customer support for the issues he was causing us.
He hung up the phone several times on us, which does not treat us with the respect a patient client is deserved. He also asked us several times to produce statements bashing his fraudulent programmer Bill so that he could sue Bill and recuperate some money for his company Prolifogy. We ended up using our own programmers to do the coding, bypassing Cory's programmers since they were not skilled enough to do it and he was just outsourcing overseas by that point, and our own programmers got most of the work done from start to finish within about 1 week's time... but we needed a refund from Prolifogy, because we used up the available budget and needed our funds back from Cory to pay our programmers to complete the project.
Finally, on 9/22/2011 Cory said he would give a full refund, but tried to attach bizarre conditions around it such as having us sign something that alleviates him for the liability and damages Prolifogy caused and that we wouldn't sue him; when said we didn't want conditions like that but asked him to send a draft release document, he once again hung up the phone on us. Just minutes after Cory rudely hung up on us, *someone* maliciously deleted the project files and changed the passwords to the server, which caused us 2 full days of stress and anguish to correct the log-in issue once we were locked out; we believe that someone to be Cory, as it obviously wasn't us and wasn't the hosting company. That night Cory then sent an insulting check for only 25% of the thousands of dollars we had paid Cory and Prolifogy.
Cory Plock: http://www.linkedin.com/in/coryplock
Prolifogy: http://Prolifogy.com
Summary:
* Cory Plock said he would give us a full refund on 9/23/2011, admitting by phone that he failed to audit code, that code was not delivered, that he had fraudulent programmers working on the project, and that he had tried outsourcing to Puerto Rico and India. Instead of a full refund, on 9/24 Cory only refunded about 10% of the total project cost, which was only 25% of the deposit we gave him.
* Cory Plock, in our opinion which is supported by very clear facts (see email excerpts below), conned us of several thousand dollars. Project cost was about $8,000. We received less than $947 returned and still have to pay our own programmers to do the code that he did not do.
* We believe Cory Plock and his company Prolifogy have done irreparable damage to us, and cost us well more than $60,000 for our time. Not to mention the stress he caused us.
* We need a refund in full to pay our own programmers to do the work he was incapable of doing. But Cory seems to be playing childish games and seems too broke to give a full refund.
* The coding needed was BASIC SIMPLE CODING (WordPress!), and we find it shocking that someone like Cory Plock who is an Expert Witness for trials cannot figure it out, which leads us to question Cory Plock's technical skills. We also question the technical skills of his firm Prolifogy, because their programmers could not do the most basic edits to WordPress. In fact, their programmer Bill couldn't even properly configure a domain name to point to the hosting DNS.
* It is clear that Prolifogy did not audit the code while it was being worked on (despite their claims, direct lies, and FALSE ADVERTISEMENT that it would be audited as it was coded), and the project dragged on several months over deadline until Cory finally removed himself and his company from the project.
* We find it shocking their (small, seemingly one-man team) company Prolifogy posted on 9/6/2011 (AFTER they just burned us on outsourcing and failed to audit code) a new blog post titled, "Burned Again by Outsourcing," and the words claiming that they, " thoroughly inspect the deliverables as they are being produced." Adding to the irony, is the fact that Cory hired someone in Puerto Rico and someone in India to do code on this project, and both programmers turned out to be a bust. The article they posted is viewable here: http://www.prolifogy.com/articles/burned-again-by-outsourcing
* 9/22: We requested a Full Refund from Cory Plock at Prolifogy, (side note: he hung up the phone on us, rudely and childishly on that phone call) and just minutes after Cory hung up the phone, *someone* deleted the project files and changed all log ins, locking myself and our team out of the server. We believe this someone to be Cory Plock, maliciously snapping back at us for requesting a refund. The server logs appear to show his IP was on the site at that time.
Details:
We hired Prolifogy. Along with this we hired their CEO Cory Plock - who really acts as a one-man team in our eyes, because despite claims the company is made of "board members," Googling reveals Lizette Plock of Deloitte is on their Advisory Board (who we believe to be his wife), and Googling reveals Cory Plock as a board member and nobody else; when we asked to speak to Prolifogy's board members about the issues Prolifogy was causing, Cory refused to allow us to talk with anyone else. So we encourage others to watch out for claims they are a big company, and to pay no attention to the pretty pictures of a company building on their homepage slideshow and board meetings-- those are just stock photography we've learned, very misleading! To us, Prolifogy seems like a sham now, and we wish we knew this earlier.
Cory Plock told us he had a programmer who was highly skilled, and later admitted to us that his programmer was a fraud and con.
Here are email excerpts, all from Cory (
[email protected] ):
7/22, "Please offer Bill reasonable opportunity to do his job." (When we confronted Cory to audit Bill's coding and the poor quality of code / non-existent code. We sounded many alarms that there were problems, and those alarms were ignored by Cory).
7/22, (Cory declined to have our programmers take over, when we offered to relieve Cory's programmer, and Cory chose to stick with his fraudulent programmer. Weeks later, Cory tried to throw in the flag and resign, but our programmers were unavailable that week and Cory said he had other options he could bring in to fix the situation).
8/9, "Bill is working quickly to pull everything together. We'll be back in touch shortly." (Cory claimed that his fraudulent programmer was doing a great job and solid code, and indicated to us that he was auditing Bill's code, despite the truth being the code was not workable and not usable. Cory had not audited the code, a truth we later found out, despite our raising numerous alarms to Cory and numerous concerns to Cory and numerous requests to Cory to please audit the code).
8/10, "Spoke to Bill. He says he *does* have subscription PHP code and a plugin. Hell be uploading that and send me the full paths to all that code tomorrow so I can audit it." (Finally some good news, right? Nope! This turns out to be a lie. Cory mislead us once again. )
8/10, "I am absolutely embarrassed and appalled by this situation. I brought Bill on just a month or two before this project beganthis is one of his first projects. He did well during his technical interview with us and exhibited excellent knowledge of his own area and other surrounding areas, and has been doing well on the other projects for us. In fairness to him, he did tell me (and I in turn told you) that this would be Bills first experience working on a Wordpress site. In any case, Im going to have a discussion with him today concerning what is done and not done, and what is salvageable for later use.
I think the real problem is that hes overextended on time with his current obligations outside of our firm, and he wasnt completely honest about the amount of time available to work. Obviously, he wasnt completely honest about the status of the project either, which is far more bothersome to me." (Cory admits the truth, once he finally looks at the product of his fraudulent programmer. Why Prolifogy would hire a new programmer, and not manage them and not audit their code, is beyond me and seems clear that Prolifogy had complete negligence and fraud. Not to mention Prolifogy's false advertisements about having qualified and skilled people, and their claims that they audit their projects).
8/12, "Turns out Bill has been doing work, but not the right kind of work." (Cory tries to now say Bill has skills, and tries to have Bill continue working on the project).
8/12, "I'm horrified by the condition of the web site." (Cory changes his mind again, realizing the truth that the project has been totally botched and no usable code done).
8/19, "Puerto Rico is turning out to be a gem. India turned out to be crap. My idea is to give the bad code to Puerto Rico tomorrow to fix up." (Cory gleefully trumps his outsource to Puerto Rico, despite our requests to have US based programmers. He admits India didn't work out so well. He also admits to bad code.).
8/22, "My coder in Puerto Rico has been incommunicado since yesterday, which I believe is due to the hurricane that just passed over there the past couple days. He was supposed to send me an invoice yesterday, but never did. His code is good, he knows what he is doing, and he works reasonably quickly, so Id like to hang in there another day to see if he comes back online." (Cory gives an excuse why his outsource in PR isn't answering, claims that he is doing good work and quick work and tries to keep the outsource on the project.). and 8/22, "The India coder turned out to be garbage and nothing he wrote was salvageable. " (Cory admits again that his programmers did no usable code).
9/1, "I contacted my Puerto Rico guy and told him to fix the Social Media links. He responded (surprisingly) and I explained the situation. He said that all of the icons and associated functionality were provided by each of the social media sites and so the load time issue is a function of each of the external sites. I asked him to look at some major websites featuring social media icons and model a new solution after that. I gave him until this afternoon." (Over a week passed, and despite the functionality that was suppose to have been worked on not being done, Cory finally hears from his overseas outsource in Puerto Rico. Cory soon after removed Puerto Rico guy, because he moved to Florida and fell out of touch/ became unresponsive and was not delivering the code that he was suppose to be delivering).
9/23, After Cory Plock hung up on us when we requested a refund, we believe he deleted files (that our own programmers had worked hard to code) and changed passwords to spitefully block us out.
And ironically... Cory Plock previously promised us lots of revenue in projects he would flip to OUR FIRM. These projects never came, but we find it shocking companies are willing to pay Prolifogy to do work of value this size. And we find it confusing that if Cory is making so much money, why he isn't giving us a refund of the thousands of dollars he owes us. Here's one email from early on:
5/12/2011, "It looks like we may have oversold some projects (good problem to have, of course). So it may come about in the next couple months that I need some high end programming talent to take over a project or two that we dont have the staffing to handle." And, "These are relatively large projects ranging $30k $200k in size."