Thomas Wictor

Well, I was wrong. Earlier I said PayPal doesn’t get involved in disputes over services. From July 5, 2013, to January 7, 2014, Mike Albee and Lura Dold of Sandpiper Publicity defrauded me of $40,000 by exploiting my mental-health issues and the suicides of my parents.

Today, PayPal refunded me $9000. I provided PayPal with links to this piece and this one, as well as my own dissection of the Mike Albee scam. I based my complaint on fraudulence, stating that Albee misrepresented himself as having worked twenty years in the publishing industry when in fact he hadn’t. I also listed the promises he made that he didn’t keep and the search-engine optimization (SEO) work for which he charged me but didn’t do.

Here are the e-mails notifying me of my refunds.

This is prima facie evidence of Mike Albee being a con man. There’s no gray area, no “He said, you said,” no ambiguity. PayPal saw fit to refund me $9000. Mike Albee is a proven fraud.

My next step is to try and get the remaining $31,000. I’ve downloaded my payment history and will match up the dates with the transaction numbers, and then submit more complaints. I don’t know what happened the first time around. Since I made the complaints only a day after I discovered that Mike is a fraud, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I could’ve made some mistakes.

The Chinese execute people for corruption, embezzlement, and theft. They shoot the condemned in the back with an assault rifle. Yet corruption, embezzlement, and theft continues. I never understood the thinking. Presumably those who accept bribes, embezzle, and steal think that they can’t possibly get caught and shot in the back with an assault rifle.

When I first spoke to Mike Albee by phone on July 1, 2013, I told him about the Australian Web designer who defrauded me. This woman agreed to build me a Website for $12,000. I paid her $6000 up front.

She laid out a schedule for each step of the process.

And she didn’t meet a single of her self-imposed deadlines. Not one. I wrote about the whole disaster here. Her tactic was to ignore my avalanche of e-mails and never answer the phone.

Eventually she said she couldn’t work because she had a vitamin deficiency. I was forced to give her a second chance, which she didn’t bother taking even though she’d begged for it, so I then demanded my money back.

She reverted to silence.

I Googled her ridiculous name and discovered that the whole time she claimed she was too sick to work, she was eating out at expensive restaurants, going to school functions, and throwing parties. She photographed her meals, trips, and parties and put them on Flickr. I took screen shots of her gorgeous photos and sent them along with her e-mails to VISA. They refunded my money and put her out of business.

Mike Albee knew all of that. I told him that I had no qualms whatsoever about putting a single mother out of business despite her pleas. She DEFRAUDED me. When I uncovered photos of her, I saw a spoiled, self-obsessed, insufferably estrogenic cartoon character. She thrived on drama, and when called out on her dishonesty and incompetence, she responded with that special gasp that she was just a girl!

All I cared about was that she robbed me. Girl or not, she had to be held accountable. And I’d told her before I signed the contract that I’m very unforgiving of people who screw me. She said she was too. Dishonest people made her furious! Then she screwed me. In the end I got my money back, and she lost her business.

After hearing how I didn’t stop until I’d utterly demolished this blubbering shambles of a Web designer, Mike Albee proceeded to defraud me of nearly seven times as much as she had. Like all those executed Chinese corruptoids, embezzlers, and thieves, he just figured he’d never get caught.

Well, Scott Thunes caught you, Mike. And now PayPal has sent me evidence that I can show the world. You are a crook and a con artist. So is your wife Lura Dold. Sandpiper Publicity and Magnus Publicity are phony companies.

All in all it was a good day. Before PayPal sent the refund notices, I found a piece of curled eucalyptus bark in my garden that looks like a giant squid.

I photographed it, tinted it squid-color, and depicted it hunting whales in the deep. Photography has become a large part of my life again. Yesterday my friend Colonel Supotnitskiy told me that he built his first camera when he was five years old. His parents bought him an SLR when he was seven. That’s why his photos are so brilliant. I’ve recently added several new galleries to his page.

Today I also sent Scott Thunes my Dean Rhapsody twelve-string bass.

I always wanted a twelve-string, so I bought this one during the period when I refused to admit that I’d lost the ability to play the bass. My plan was to graft the neck and hardware onto a lefty body. It’s brand new, having never been played. Yesterday the bulb went on over my head: Give it to Scott. It’d never occurred to me, since I associate Scott exclusively with four-string basses.

But it’s on its way to his house as a reward for his panache during his health crisis.

I’d hoped to someday play my twelve-string like Vic Danger.

It wasn’t to be, but the bass served a much more important purpose: cheering up a dear friend. So it was worth losing the ability to play. I got to give Scott Thunes a twelve-string bass!

I’m the only person in human history to have done so.