After talking with local law enforcement, I was told that my best bet would be a civil, class action lawsuit if I could find individuals willing to join in. I am researching this and will be looking for others on WebHostingTalk and other areas who were defrauded by Lyron Foster.
It's not a criminal matter since personal information was not illegally used or stolen and service was given for a short period of time, therefore not fraud.
Coming soon: W2Servers Class Action Lawsuit
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Sunday, August 14, 2011
W2Servers Refund Fraud - What To Bring To The Police
This is what I am bringing to my local police department tomorrow:
- Invoices from W2Servers' client area showing they were paid
- Paypal records showing that it was paid
- Every "please give us 24 - 48 hours" ticket and my response
- Transfer tickets that were not responded to
- Lyron's emails from 5/26/2011 and 07/11/2011
The 5/6 email is "exponential growth, temporary halted sales, my competitors do not like me, and feel free to ask for an email" and the 7/11 email is "we have a new colo and renumbered with IP addresses"
Print these out, get out of the house for 30 minutes to go to your local police department to talk to a detective, explain everything from them and file a report. THATS ALL YOU NEED TO DO, WHY HAVE ALL OF YOU GIVEN UP?
Your detective will talk to Dallas Police Dept and Hawaii PD to get to the bottom of this! If ENOUGH of us do this VERY SIMPLE act, we can get Lyron Foster thrown in jail for fraud.
Friday, August 12, 2011
W2Servers Scam Update: Filing A Police Report
Lyin' Lyron, the scam is coming to an end very soon.
I'm filing a fraud report with my local police about "fraud by deception" and hopefully, Hawaii Police Department will pick him up if there is enough complaints. If you were burned by W2Servers and Lyron Foster, this is what I recommend you to do:
Print out all the emails you received from W2Servers. I happened to keep all of them.
I have all the emails as payment invoices and proved that I paid, plus all the emails of them jerking us along by saying they will be up in x amount of time, sorry that was delayed now it's x amount of time, and the infamous July 1st update.
I went ahead and put in for a refund request for a refund in 30 days but by then, the police report should have already hit Hawaii. I have documentation that my refund requests were ignored and the same with support ticket requests.
I'm filing a fraud report with my local police about "fraud by deception" and hopefully, Hawaii Police Department will pick him up if there is enough complaints. If you were burned by W2Servers and Lyron Foster, this is what I recommend you to do:
Print out all the emails you received from W2Servers. I happened to keep all of them.
I have all the emails as payment invoices and proved that I paid, plus all the emails of them jerking us along by saying they will be up in x amount of time, sorry that was delayed now it's x amount of time, and the infamous July 1st update.
I went ahead and put in for a refund request for a refund in 30 days but by then, the police report should have already hit Hawaii. I have documentation that my refund requests were ignored and the same with support ticket requests.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
W2Servers / W2 Interactive Inc - BBB Usage
Advertising Review
On March 8, 2011 the BBB requested that the company discontinue use of BBB trademarks which represented the company as a BBB accredited business. The company was not a BBB accredited business.
As of March 8, 2011, the company discontinued use of the BBB trademarks.
Ha! If you do not know, the BBB or Better Business Bureau, is an organization that acts as an intermediary between a company you have a dispute with and the company. In a nutshell, being BBB accredited is a good thing and most hosting providers (note "most" and not "all") avoid being BBB accredited.
W2 Servers Website - Now Hosted By Amazon EC2
Wow, with everything going on, Lyron Foster and Kellis Johnson had time to switch two providers this month? According to Low End Box, on 1/12/2011, W2 Servers was hosted on 173.212.214.235 which is HostNOC up in Scranton. The IP address is now provisioned and SWIP'd to another provider.
On June 6th, 2011 - the IP address switched to 173.234.185.151 which is owned by Ubiquity Servers and hosted out in Los Angeles.
Yesterday, on June 17th, the IP address switched to 50.19.254.29 which is owned by Amazon EC2 for it's cloud platform. I'm glad to see Lyron Foster, Kellis Johnson and the whole W2 Servers crew utilizing the cloud but you had all the time to do that but not time to issue refunds to your clients, send out a new email explaining everything or informing us?
Now you wonder why people are talking on forums, starting up blogs like this, and yet you have the nerve to get into "sparring" matches with them due to your "bad attitude". In my customer service experience of over ten years, people with bad attitudes have them for a reason - as a defense mechanism.
Low End Box says the WHOIS info changed but I'm noticing the phone number on w2servers.com being listed as 214-635-4492 while web2reality.com, the domain they use for Paypal processing, is 469-212-7932. The 214 area code phone number went to Dallas, Texas Better Business Bureau and their listing of W2 Interactive, Inc. which if anyone felt like filing a complaint with the BBB - I would take the time out to file it because they will fight on your behalf for your money.
The 469 area code number brought up some typical W2 Interactive, Inc. stuff but a few links brought me this precious jewel. This webpage claims that there are 2 employees with W2 Interactive, Inc and their annual revenue is $125,000!
It might explain Kellis Johnson and Lyron Foster, plus the outsourced Indian tech support who answers you at 2am Eastern time in the USA..
On June 6th, 2011 - the IP address switched to 173.234.185.151 which is owned by Ubiquity Servers and hosted out in Los Angeles.
Yesterday, on June 17th, the IP address switched to 50.19.254.29 which is owned by Amazon EC2 for it's cloud platform. I'm glad to see Lyron Foster, Kellis Johnson and the whole W2 Servers crew utilizing the cloud but you had all the time to do that but not time to issue refunds to your clients, send out a new email explaining everything or informing us?
Now you wonder why people are talking on forums, starting up blogs like this, and yet you have the nerve to get into "sparring" matches with them due to your "bad attitude". In my customer service experience of over ten years, people with bad attitudes have them for a reason - as a defense mechanism.
Low End Box says the WHOIS info changed but I'm noticing the phone number on w2servers.com being listed as 214-635-4492 while web2reality.com, the domain they use for Paypal processing, is 469-212-7932. The 214 area code phone number went to Dallas, Texas Better Business Bureau and their listing of W2 Interactive, Inc. which if anyone felt like filing a complaint with the BBB - I would take the time out to file it because they will fight on your behalf for your money.
The 469 area code number brought up some typical W2 Interactive, Inc. stuff but a few links brought me this precious jewel. This webpage claims that there are 2 employees with W2 Interactive, Inc and their annual revenue is $125,000!
It might explain Kellis Johnson and Lyron Foster, plus the outsourced Indian tech support who answers you at 2am Eastern time in the USA..
W2Servers and Paypal
If you were a previous customer, you received an email about W2 Servers dropping Paypal as their payment processor and going over to a credit card processor. On May 11th, 2011 when I purchased my "limited time" offer for a free quad-core upgrade and 1 gigabyte of RAM for $24/year when everything else was 512mb of RAM and an AMD Opteron CPU - once the payment processed, I received this email about 2 hours later.
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To: (removed)
Subject: Billing Changes: Paypal
Date: Wed, 11 May 2011 14:47:01 -0400
From: =?utf-8?Q?W2_Interactive=2C_Inc_=E2=84=A2?=
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Dear Customer,
As a result of excessive fraud and abuse originating from paypal payments. We have decided to discontinue general use of paypal.
Paypal is still available as a payment option for well established customers. It will not be available in the sign-up forms, so if you wish to use paypal you must open a ticket to billing to request approval.
Thank you in advance for your cooperation.
--
Seriously? Fraud and abuse payments?
W2Servers will keep around a client who had
With Paypal's dispute policy, you can only dispute transactions of up to 45 days if you paid via your Paypal account as the primary source of funding. Maybe this was the idea to cut and run? However, with credit card processors, fees and other charges come up if you dispute a payment. It wouldn't be very wise to fight a $24 payment for a year's worth of VPS service when the fees charged by the bank could be $15 - 25, depending on your financial institution.
I talked to Paypal and my March VPS was paid for by Paypal funding but my May VPS was a debit card transaction processed by Paypal, which would give me an advantage to dispute the payment with my bank and I plan on doing it at 9am on Monday morning. I hope to get more information from the bank about Lyin' Lyron Foster and W2Servers / W2Interactive from the bank to put it online for others to follow through.
This is why Lyron switched to a traditional credit card processor because of the "fees" his company likes to tack on like a VPS transfer from one data center to another for $10 and "improperly" filed support tickets for another $10 per incident.
With Paypal, you would have to submit a request for $10 for the improper ticket filing and hope the client pays it. The client could simply refuse, ignore the request and would W2 Servers terminate the customer's VPS knowing full well that what would result is a Paypal / credit card dispute which would ultimately end up with Lyron Foster and his companies losing?
With the credit card processor, you have to trust W2 Servers / W2 Interactive with having your financial information. I wouldn't even trust them beyond that, because all they would do is tack on ridiculous fees just because you filed a ticket in the wrong area where there are 10 available ticket departments so it's easy to get confused. Also, since they would have your credit card information on file, they could charge you whenever they felt like it.
I will keep all of you updated with what happens on Monday with my bank and the challenge of disputing a payment. Hopefully, through my experience, I can show you how to dispute a payment with them while you still can and hopefully get your money back. I do not think all hope is lost, just temporarily.
Need further proof about W2 Servers and Paypal?
--
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Date: Wed, 11 May 2011 14:47:01 -0400
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Dear Customer,
As a result of excessive fraud and abuse originating from paypal payments. We have decided to discontinue general use of paypal.
Paypal is still available as a payment option for well established customers. It will not be available in the sign-up forms, so if you wish to use paypal you must open a ticket to billing to request approval.
Thank you in advance for your cooperation.
With Paypal's dispute policy, you can only dispute transactions of up to 45 days if you paid via your Paypal account as the primary source of funding. Maybe this was the idea to cut and run? However, with credit card processors, fees and other charges come up if you dispute a payment. It wouldn't be very wise to fight a $24 payment for a year's worth of VPS service when the fees charged by the bank could be $15 - 25, depending on your financial institution.
I talked to Paypal and my March VPS was paid for by Paypal funding but my May VPS was a debit card transaction processed by Paypal, which would give me an advantage to dispute the payment with my bank and I plan on doing it at 9am on Monday morning. I hope to get more information from the bank about Lyin' Lyron Foster and W2Servers / W2Interactive from the bank to put it online for others to follow through.
This is why Lyron switched to a traditional credit card processor because of the "fees" his company likes to tack on like a VPS transfer from one data center to another for $10 and "improperly" filed support tickets for another $10 per incident.
With Paypal, you would have to submit a request for $10 for the improper ticket filing and hope the client pays it. The client could simply refuse, ignore the request and would W2 Servers terminate the customer's VPS knowing full well that what would result is a Paypal / credit card dispute which would ultimately end up with Lyron Foster and his companies losing?
With the credit card processor, you have to trust W2 Servers / W2 Interactive with having your financial information. I wouldn't even trust them beyond that, because all they would do is tack on ridiculous fees just because you filed a ticket in the wrong area where there are 10 available ticket departments so it's easy to get confused. Also, since they would have your credit card information on file, they could charge you whenever they felt like it.
I will keep all of you updated with what happens on Monday with my bank and the challenge of disputing a payment. Hopefully, through my experience, I can show you how to dispute a payment with them while you still can and hopefully get your money back. I do not think all hope is lost, just temporarily.
Need further proof about W2 Servers and Paypal?
Business Name: W2 INTERACTIVE INC (The recipient of this payment is Verified) Email: accounting@web2reality.com Payment Sent to: billing@w2interactive.net |
Why would you have two separate email accounts for this?
Domain Name: WEB2REALITY.COM
Registrar: GODADDY.COM, INC.
Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com
Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com
Name Server: NS1.W2INTERACTIVE.NET
Name Server: NS2.W2INTERACTIVE.NET
Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Status: clientRenewProhibited
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Updated Date: 09-jan-2011
Creation Date: 25-dec-2008
Expiration Date: 25-dec-2011
Domain is about to expire.. how convenient!
Like all W2 Servers / W2 Interactive domains, it's registered to "Kelis Johnson" of W2 Interactive, Inc. with the address of 3767 Forest Lane, Suite 124 #1297. Dallas, Texas. 75244. I put the address into Google Maps and it appears to be a strip mall with a Starbucks nearby and a FedEx office. I'm not saying that's indicative of being a scam, it's just where the domains point to and you need to cover all the grounds when doing an investigation like this.
Chicago / FDC: The Real Story
So "Lyin" Lyron Foster claims a hard disk failure was the cause for the server being lost in Chicago at the FDC data center... really?
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Subject: Chicago VPS Node: cr210
Date: Wed, 25 May 2011 00:32:16 -0400
From: =?utf-8?Q?W2_Interactive=2C_Inc_=E2=84=A2?=
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The Chicago node: cr210 is down due to a disk failure. We are working on recovery of this server and we hope it is online soon. This server has been experiencing degraded disk performance for a while. If you need immediate access to a vps we can set your service up on another Chicago node while this one is being worked on and migrate the data over to the new node if possible once it's online again.
If you have been wanting to test out another location, we are waiving the $10 transfer fee if you wanted to transfer your service to one of our other 11 locations.
Thank you for your patience.
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network:Auth-Area:67.159.0.0/18
network:Class-Name:network
network:OrgName:FDCservers.net LLC
network:OrgID;I:DONATE-BLEACH7COM
network:Address:141 West Jackson Blvd, Suite 1135
network:City:Chicago
network:StateProv:N/A
network:PostalCode:60604
network:Country:US
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The Chicago node: cr210 is down due to a disk failure. We are working on recovery of this server and we hope it is online soon. This server has been experiencing degraded disk performance for a while. If you need immediate access to a vps we can set your service up on another Chicago node while this one is being worked on and migrate the data over to the new node if possible once it's online again.
If you have been wanting to test out another location, we are waiving the $10 transfer fee if you wanted to transfer your service to one of our other 11 locations.
Thank you for your patience.
--
network:Auth-Area:67.159.0.0/18
network:Class-Name:network
network:OrgName:FDCservers.net LLC
network:OrgID;I:DONATE-BLEACH7COM
network:Address:141 West Jackson Blvd, Suite 1135
network:City:Chicago
network:StateProv:N/A
network:PostalCode:60604
network:Country:US
Why did you lose your Chicago / FDC IP addresses to Bleach7 when all of this was allegedly a hard disk failure according to your email but going on 25 days later, FDC reassigned all your IP addresses to another customer? "Lyin" Lyron, we're not stupid. The more I dig, the more information I find.
Give everyone their money back, stop wasting everybody's time and go drink your South African wine that you love so much.
Give everyone their money back, stop wasting everybody's time and go drink your South African wine that you love so much.
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