Thomas Wictor

Here’s a reminder of what happens to people who continually attack me.

1. An Australian Web designer used my money to eat at expensive restaurants, where she photographed the meals. She also threw parties, at which she photographed the food. I discovered this after she missed every deadline in our contract.

My father died February 23, 2013, after a month of indescribable hell.

I’d already been completely screwed by one “Web designer” who took my money, signed me up for a WordPress blog, and left me to upload everything and design it. When I complained, he pointed out that the contract didn’t say they were going to make me a “Website”; it said they were going to “provide me with a WordPress solution.”

He was right, so I paid.

I told the second Web designer that if she screwed me, I’d make her sorry that she’d ever heard my name. She agreed that anyone who shafted someone deserved what they got. Then she shafted me.

The way I found out she was rooking me was by Googling her stupid, infantile “handle” and seeing all the photos of food, restaurants, and parties she posted on Flickr. Each was dated; during the days she claimed to be too sick to work, she was eating out or partying.

So I told her to refund my money, or I’d fix her wagon in ways she couldn’t comprehend. She begged me for an extension. The reason for the deadline was that I was supposed to start a book publicity campaign for my memoir Ghosts and Ballyhoo. I learned that nobody could build me the Website I wanted in the time remaining before the campaign was to begin, so I gave her a second chance.

She did nothing for several days, and then she crafted a homepage that looked pretty much like this.

Except she put a blue ribbon on it, as though I were a prize hog at a country fair.

I told her to refund my money, and she never responded. Australia doesn’t care about their citizens defrauding Americans, so I contacted Visa; I’d made the payment with my credit card. Before I enter a business agreement with anybody, I prepare to ruin them. Just in case. So I sent Visa all my evidence—the contract, screenshots of her dated meals, her e-mails claiming she was too sick to work, and the absurd Web page she slapped together in eighteen seconds.

A very tough-sounding woman called me, introducing herself as the Visa fraud investigator. After we went over everything, she said, “We’re going to make an example of her.”

So they refunded my money, and they put this single mother out of business. Her future is very bleak, since Visa has labeled her a con artist. She now has no Web presence whatsoever, and I sleep soundly at night. She brought all that calamity down on her own head.

2. Two professional con artists named Mike Albee and Lura Dold defrauded me of my life’s savings by pretending to publicize my book and by monitoring my Website for posts about the prolonged death of my mother.

Mike Albee.

Lura Dold.

The death of my mother was the most painful experience of my life, because she used the month leading up to it as an occasion to express all her pent-up rage. She refused to eat, and then when she’d developed cachexia and was beyond salvation, she panicked and tried to change her mind. In her last three days, she was semiconscious, crying and wailing behind an oxygen mask. My PTSD manifests itself as dissociation. The brain fog of Meniere’s disease is also exacerbated by stress, so I was out of my mind for a solid year.

Mike and Lura doubled billed me and charged for a nonexistent service the day I wrote this post.

There came whisperings in the winds:
“Good-bye! good-bye!”
Little voices called in the darkness:
“Good-bye! good-bye!”
Then I stretched forth my arms.
“No—No—”
There came whisperings in the wind:
“Good-bye! good-bye!”
Little voices called in the darkness:
“Good-bye! good-bye!”

—Stephen Crane

I paid them because I was not sane at the time.

When I discovered that Mike and Lura had defrauded me, I offered them the chance to refund me. They didn’t respond. So I taught myself the secrets of search-engine optimization (SEO), and I began posting every day about what crooks Mike and Lura are. Several people in the publishing industry swore they’d help me expose him, but none of them did anything, really. “We’ll do lunch” is their ontology, another reason why I’m glad I quit trying to be a writer.

However, one of Albee’s acquaintances contacted me and told me that I’d driven him out of business. He had to shut down his fake book-publicity companies due to my posts and my skill at getting them in the top ten results of searches on Mike Albee.

Someone then told me that he’d started a new fake company. I posted about that, and now it’s gone.

Mike thought he was a lot smarter than he is. I’ve got his home address, and I paid a fee to learn everything he’s up to. I sent this information to a select group of people whom he and Lura screwed.

Godspeed, Mike and Lura. You should see the e-mails I’ve gotten from that guy. Some con artists are so innocent I could almost feel sorry for them. Mike, what made you and Lura think you could mess with someone like him? Didn’t his life’s story make alarm bells clang in your skulls?

3. Mike and Lura had a cute little assistant named Becca Pilkington. She’s on the right.

Becca clearly knew that Sandpiper Publicity was a fake company. Some of the former employees don’t exist. Becca would have conversations either with herself or Mike or Lura. I contacted her when I was trying to locate Mike, and she refused to cooperate. So I wrote a post about her.

She sent me an e-mail, pretending to be someone else, telling me it was “unfair” to implicate her in the sting played against me.

“No fair!”

Becca, tell it to that guy that you and Mike and Lura screwed. He scared me to death when he called.

And he liked me!

Good luck.

And for everybody else, I’ve made some great friends since June of 2014. I don’t know who they are, but they helped me for months. They’re aware of the incessant assaults on me. That’s because I’ve sent them names, an address, and phone numbers.

Time to play one of my favorite songs again.

“With the perverse thou wilt show thyself perverse.”

It’s my credo. I’m a huge believer in vengeance, I rarely forgive, and I never stop until the attacker has paid for the damage done.