Online Contractor ran off with Down Payment

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

I’m afraid I need a bit of advice and, after scouring Google, I haven’t been able to find anything informative regarding what to do regarding this situation.

We had a contractor run off after receiving an upfront payment for some animation work we’ve been looking to commission. The individual kept ensuring us he’d do the work we had contracted him to do for over the course of about 2 months. As of recently, he went quiet entirely, and we’ve nothing to show beyond a very hastily done, extremely poor quality rig he threw together.

The contractor signed a legal contract prior to payment and receiving of any of our game assets to work with.

Though he’s certainly breached contract, I’m afraid I don’t know what to do. The amount in question is 330 USD. If I pursue legal action, would it even be worth the lawyer and court costs?

What avenue can I go down to get our money back?

2

Depending on how you paid them you might be able to get your money back. Otherwise, it’s something that’ll cost you more than what you paid to fight.

3

We paid through PayPal. Unfortunately, the only option I can see for the transaction is to flag the transaction as unauthorized, which is false. At the time it was indeed authorized. I may give PayPal a quick call and see what they say.

4

There’s a good chance you can get it back, as it was a purchase and you didn’t get what you purchased.

5

Unfortunately, I just tried with PayPal. The claim was denied. I think we’re just going to have to accept the loss and warn other people we know about this.

7

Thanks for the link! I just now saw this, as I don’t log on the forums for UE too often. I went ahead and wrote a full report of our experience with this individual on the forum,

8

I use a middle man its called upwork spent about 3k on there now they take the money and pass it on might be worth a look if you are not discouraged from trying again. You can try small claims to try and get your funds back but the amount that might cost in its self could make it a non starter. It varies depending on country

9

The problem with upwork is that both the jobs and the standard of work you get tend to be garbage.

10

Thankfully, we have only had this happen to us once. We have established good working relations with two other parties we’ve met on the UE forums through similar means. I am thinking that perhaps UE4 needs a place for people to post about who has done credible work for them, such that it allows good people to establish a positive reputation here.