Hello all.
I am a freelance writer at Freelancer and bid on a project posted by Michele Walls of WV Writing Services. This was in September. I was selected and was on the company's payroll. I did not, and even now don't, have a problem with the pay rates. It was clearly stated in the project description and I was also well aware of the rates that SEO articles command. It was also stated at the onset that writers would be paid for the finished articles only after they were accepted by the client. This could take as long as a week. I had no problem with that either. I wrote several articles for them for a period of one month before they informed me that my skills were no longer needed. Fair enough. However, they forgot to give me my due. Needless to say, I reminded them continuously over the next three months about this. They ignored me (Check the images). As a last resort, I turned to Rip-Off-Report.
During my stay with WV Writing Services, I had no problems. There were three people who were always available to solve the writer's problems, They were Michele Walls, Rocco Smith and Ken Chase. With them around you had, more or less, 24x7 support. They were ALWAYS (a lot of emphasis on this word) there. My problems with the company began after I left them. The last batch of articles I wrote for them was on October 19th. When I left the company, I was owed a measly $40.25. One month went by. Then on November 18th, I contacted Michele Walls.
Michele Walls was the CEO of the company and she was the one who used to hand out the payments. So, it made sense to contact her. However, I got no response. From Nov 18th to Nov 25th, I sent several messages through Skype (Check the SKYPE images). I still got no response. However, I knew that they were delivered. Then from Nov 26th, all my messages failed. I repeatedly sent messages right until Dec 29th. But, all of them failed. "The messages could not be delivered", that's what Skype said. I thought this was weird. So, I contacted SKYPE Support. This is what they told me: "Your contact is blocking you on their contact list." Now why would Michele Walls do this? She would only do this if she had an intention of not paying me my dues, however small it may be. I then decided to message her through Freelancer, since that is where she posted her project. I sent several messages to her. I even got the Freelancer administration to send her a message. Still no response. I know she got them because she logged in. She even posted a few projects and reviewed another freelancer. When I decided to file a complaint against her at Freelancer, they simply washed their hands off the issue.
I have sent Michele countless mails. Check the image. When I was with WV Writing Services, I communicated with Michele using two email addresses (I use Gmail and Michele had two email addresses, one Yahoo! and the other was a company email address). During that time, her reply was prompt. The story now is much different. For almost two months now, I have sent her several mails. No response.
You might think that by this time I had exhausted all my options. However, there was one more way through which I could get Michele Walls to respond: PayPal. I, and all the other writers in the company, were paid by Michele through PayPal. So, I decided to "request money" through Paypal. I created two invoices for this purpose, each with a slight difference in the amount owed. It was an effort in vain.
Unbelievable isn't it! You must really wonder what it takes to get Michele Walls attention. However, I used one more strategy: I contacted her colleagues, Ken Chase and Roscoe Smith. Ros responded quick, I'll give him that. Ken, however, took his own sweet time to get back to me.In any case, I am sure that Ken and Ros have passed the message to Michele Walls and the other concerned person. I had my conversations with them in the first week of December itself. That was a really long time back. Yet I haven't received any response. So, its now become crystal clear to me that Michele Walls has no intention of paying me by dues.
My next step was to file a complaint. I did a little bit of Googling and I found that there were previous complaints against Michele Walls. Here they are:
http://www.ripoffreport.com/work-at-home/michele-walls-wv-wri/michele-walls-wv-writing-ser-28a5d.htm
http://www.ripoffreport.com/work-at-home/w-v-writing-services/w-v-writing-services-w-v-whole-99796.htm
Now, I wish I did some Googling before joining WV Writing Services.