Domain & Website Hi-Jacking

Our media company Majenta Media used the services of a designer called Geeklab, namely Jared Coleman as a graphic design and social media supplier. The relationship was workable, however we did experience poor performance from Geeklab mis-allocating our credit card for boosting funds for their other client Liquor on the Run and various other smaller incidents. Through the relationship with Majenta Media, Geeklab suggested a website upgrade and registration of domains utilising our company name as to avoid external companies claiming ownership. This seemed an informative gesture in which we progressed with a quotation request. Jared advised the retainer would be R1000 per month per company and would be a total of 4 months to complete per site. We approved a quotation to register 8 domains for a cost of R2,400, to later find out he had registered these domains through Afrihost in his own personal name & ID. When we requested ownership be returned to our group as we have paid for these domains, he submitted a further quote to transfer the domains into our name and the annual hosting amount which he hadn't yet paid over to Afrihost. Afrihost advised they could not assist us as the ownership was in Jared's name under his ID number and we had to wait a year until the domains became available again, and if Jared did not re-register these domains. We also approved a quotation to complete 6 websites, and in a period of 4 months he had only started working on 2 of the 6 sites and published these 2 sites live without any any meetings with our group / individual clients or approval to publish the sites . The sites were in a template format, littered with errors with no relation to our business model / information and in a foreign language. We requested the sites to be removed immediately and Jared advised it's meant to be raw and continuously reworked for an ongoing retainer (no end date). He bragged at one point of a client paying a retainer for a 2 year period which is still incomplete. If you look at Geeklab's own website, this is also incomplete! Based on the refusal to remove our sites off the live platform we withheld 1 months retainer payment of R4K, Jared responded by suspending all of our domains and inflating his final price to R30K in order to hand over ownership or transfer of the sites to our group of companies. He then closed all of our companies on google suggesting our group and individual companies are permanently closed or gone under. Jared and his friends progressed further with posting poor google reviews on each companysuggesting we sell canabis and we are thieves, as well as posting an image of my face on a Julius Malema facebook page telling people "thieves of our nation" and to boycott my company and myself. We have litigated and have had no result, therefore resorted in opening a case at the police station for defamation of character and fraud for a brand new apple laptop he has kept as "payment for the sites" which we do not have ownership of. We reported the case in March, and have had no response or follow up from the police. Jared has continued to harass our companies online with poor reviews and claiming ownership of our company's on google and closing our operating times. We have managed to recover 3 of the domains we paid for as he never actually registered these, and have had to recreate the other sites to recover our business online presence at an additional cost.

Jared has created a fake website that all the hi-jacked domains now point to promoting the all the services of our group without our contact information listed. Therefore we are losing further business should any of our clients request a quotation, I assume these enquiries go straight to Jared. Jared's response to the site enquiry was "And as for "fake site" we've had a client buy the account and domains." In summary, we have paid over R10K towards domains and websites we have no ownership of, and had a loss of R20K on a laptop he has stolen. We have incurred loss of business through the suspension of our groups sites, redirection of our domains to a fictitious site he has created, re-registration of domains and re-creation of websites at additional cost, poor reviews on google and defamation of character on social media. It's unfair that website designers hold you ransom and there is no formal system in place to protect clients against these suppliers where cloud based property paid for is not honoured or returned to the rightful owners. We would like to create awareness around this industry of thieves and spark an interest in new business' to open to protect companies undergoing the same experience.