Topic: Rogue Customer - " Scott Deleon " - page 2. (Read 3351 times)

If this is true and your services are so solid, and your customers are happy, don't you think JUST MAYBE you over reacted? That is to say if he is just one guy and his accusations really are silly, don't you think you are causing more harm to yourself than him? You didn't think this thru.

As per your request;

We sent him an email basically saying look, we are no longer replying to emails from you - However they will be recorded for legal purposes.

The email explained that we never lied to him as to why his IP was blocked. The automated IP block was explained in full.

The email also contained a clause stating that if false accusations are to be made by Scott, then we will be disclosing the dispute public.


A reply shortly made by Scott -




We are happy if it goes to the FBI as our reply will include the full dispute report provided by our lawyers.


It's a 5$ service - Of which Scott's complaining that we scammed him for 2 weeks.

Not a big dispute, however the defamation is considerable.

Kluge, we aren't really fussed about it ( lawyers want to take it further but we don't see the need ) - Its the fact that the accusations are just so silly after what we did to help him out. ( Account credit offered, telephone call to attempt to resolve the dispute offered an account credit on the phone too )

How come we have had 5 phone calls just this afternoon saying basically " Good on you guys, stick up for yourselves and your company - Don't let some idiot post up false crap  ".

It seems that people on WHT forums can express a dispute, The web host comes on, explains the whole dispute includes their name....  ( yes, many hosts on WHT have disclosed the clients name in replying to the dispute )

yet here on bitcoin you guys are all going nuts because we disclosed his name? Look at what Scott has threatened - Hes apparently going to be FBI about how he was scammed for 2 weeks of hosting.

Yes I will mention it again - We offered a refund multiple times, Even a big account credit of $50 over the phone. Scott declined.

Seems most of you care about his name being made public rather than what hes done.


Have a good day guys, Thanks for your input

Seriously though, although only 4 or 5 people have commented so far, the fact that you are getting a response this strong must mean you are doing something wrong. If you want, you can wait for more feedback, but the "Its ok if we abuse our customers, we have plenty of others" is sort of the paypal mentality. And if you don't have 132 Million customers, that is going to bite you pretty quickly. Assuming it is within your rights to post his info, its still a very bad move, that I'd be willing to bet will negatively effect your business in terms of new customers and your current "happy" customers.

I'm pretty pissed off still about your lack of professionalism, and I'm not even one of your customers. I can't imagine how "happy" your customers will see when they see this.

Oohhhh would you look at that, the trade level has been changed.

Kluge, lovely feedback. Sad that its invalid though?

Thats ok, we have plenty of clients that are happy with our services.

We don't need a PR specialist to handle trolls like yourself here on the forums.

TECSHARE - Thanks for your kind input, However our lawyers do consider your replies relatively invalid.


The client was fully informed that if false accusations regarding his dispute was made, We would also disclose the dispute public for fair public view.

His privacy hasn't been breached, essentially we have not breached any privacy laws.

Do take care in the fact that, Scott Deleon can be taken to court and sued - for Defamation.

We do suspect that Scott Deleon has attempted to blackmail/extort other company's -
We have recently been contacted by one company which had a very similar experience with Scott...

We hope that other businesses within the bitcoin market do not get into a dispute with him.

We pay our lawyers good money...

They have clearly advised us that posting his name is all OK.

However posting his email address, address and/or location is illegal. We have not disclosed his email, address or location.

We informed the client of the fact that IF, he were to make false accusations we would disclose the case details for the public to review.

Essentially alerting the customer to the disclosure has secured our position - The company protecting its name.

We have many cryptocurrency customers - Privacy is a priority.

We reserve the right in any case to disclose any disputes to the public if our legal team concludes to an agreement, just like any other company/corporation does.


Best Regards,
Allan - Chief Administrator @ Quantum Kiwi

Id be happy to find it for you. I may have the order of things wrong there subsections and whatnaught, but as per FTC laws, you are not allowed to divulge living customer's information to anyone but business partners. I found the specific link the New Zealand's equivilent, which is more or less the same, because I believe quantumkiwi is based in NZ, however give me a moment and I'll find the U.S version, and link it.

http://www.business.ftc.gov/privacy-and-security/consumer-privacy

If you start here, there are a list of laws and guides. This section, Financial Privacy Rule (Privacy of consumer financial information) is pretty good, it has a lot of info that pertains to banks and financial institutions, but it also talks about personal information and the definitions of customers under non financial circumstances.

While I don't agree with the release of customer information in the manner of the OP, can you provide a link to an authoritative source for the laws you cite? I ask because I don't believe your characterization of the law is correct, at least on a federal level, in the United States, with regard to non-financial information.

You don't just unilaterally decide to dox people.... even most teenage kids know better than that. If it ever does happen people are usually given a chance to fix the wrongs they have done, you just decided it was ok to exploit your business to harass people because you are upset.

From a business perspective you doing this is MORONIC, especially in this community. If I was looking for a host and saw this, and felt there was even a slight chance you might make a mistake and do this to me I wouldn't use your services. You clearly have no respect for customer privacy. All this demonstrates is that you have the temper of a child and the reasoning to match.

Furthermore because you have a privacy policy for hosting, which is a contractual obligation that you violated, the customer now has grounds to sue you in court. Not very smart. Law aside, this is pretty stupid, and you might want to reconsider doing this again in the future... you never know who you are messing with, and it could bite you in the ass.

Actually yes, I have run quite a few over the years, and have had to deal with some people I wish I hadn't, but you legally and morally are not allowed to release customer information. Go find a case where Paypal, Ebay, or more relevant in your field, Namecheap, or GoDaddy ever released customer information. Also, your "lawyers" are wrong in this case, as you are violating U.S Consumer protection laws under the database privacy section of FTC Online Merchant laws. If you gather information from a customer, you are not allowed to release that information in any form to anyone, except registered business offiliates and for advertising purposes, with proper identification shields. If you are hosting outside of the U.S, it may not necessarily be illegal, however it is in incredibly poor taste.

All legality asside, because this is crypto world, and chances are, Mr. Deleon is not going to sue you, however after seeing this thread, not a single crypto user would dare use your service. One of the founding theories behind crypto currencies is reasonable privacy. I'm actually apalled that you would give out a customers name like this. They purchased your services, whether happy or unhappy about it, but should not be treated like this, even if they have a low opinion of your service. The montra, "The Customer is always right" is actually not true. Many times customers will be dumbasses, however it is up to you to perform at an elevated level because you are a business, and try and resolve the solution. If he wouldn't take a refund, then you offer them compensation in the form of hosting, or some other arrangement. If they don't accept that, where they are bashing your company, you can truthfully say, we are sorry, and offered a full refund or X, but the customer was not interested. In that case you are in the right, and the person complaining looks like someone who is just mad for the sake of being mad.  

You cannot say, have a good opinion of us, or we will release your information. It just doesn't work like that.

*Edit* Even if you are not based out of the U.S, your customer is so I am 100% certain, that if they wished to persue it, they would have grounds to sue your company. And for the record, I don't have anything personal against you, or your company, however I am very very firm on the belief that privacy is the most valuable thing people have around here, and they are entitled not to lose their right of privacy unless they have scammed someone.

According to our lawyers, we have a right to disclose the case related to Scott Deleon to the public - As this provides both sides of the story, to allow people to make their own decision.

We offered Scott a refund multiple times, However he declined.

We do take privacy very seriously - However we will not tolerate false accusations against our company.

Feel free to check out " scam accusations " against web hosts on WHT forums. You will notice 99% of all web hosts that are accused of being a scam, actually disclose the case information to the public within the forums and provide the other side of the story.


It seems a few people are against us disclosing the case, Do you think its ok for clients to go out and make false accusations against a company and the company does nothing?

SaltySpitoon - Do you run a business? I highly doubt it.

Yeah, for a dispute over $5, you probably would have been best not to sell out your "rogue" customer's information like that. The Crypto community takes privacy very seriously, and you probably just got rid of more customers with this thread than some guy saying bad things about you did. People make a lot of accusations, and people tend to disregard them and look into matters themselves, perhaps a little more skeptically than before, but no one takes the word of anyone here, because the term scam is overused. However like I said, this is far worse press than them claiming your site is a scam.

Although, over $5, and because you acknowledge the IP banning mistake on your end, why didn't you just refund their money? It was $5.

Also, you can't say, privacy only to those who respect our name...

Emails informing Scott Deleon of the fact that if, he makes the case public - We will also make it public and disclose all information related to " Scott Deleon's Accusations ".

If he wants to go out and make false accusations about our company, Its fair that the public knows exactly how hes been apparently " scammed ".


Privacy? Oh yeah, thats for clients that RESPECT OUR COMPANY and don't make rubbish false accusations.

Seriously if you want to take this guys side, go for it

.... .... ....

Wow - you certainly don't care about the privacy of your customers.

Quantum Kiwi has recently taken on a rogue customer, yes thats right a rogue customer.

This client signed up to a $4.95 web hosting plan of ours, located on our website - The Iron hosting plan.

13/08/2013 - Client Signed up to plan.
13/08/2013 - Email received - " Was I scammed or are your statements false? " - This email was sent in near immediately after signup, accusing us of being a scam and why isn't his account instantly activated - We have a policy of not activating bitcoin services immediately, well because bitpay only shows the invoice as paid until confirmations have gone through... Paypal is instant. Also said hes been waiting 12 hours+.
13/08/2013 - Clients account & order was activated.
20/08/2013 - Support Ticket submitted - Stating that he could not connect to his account - He said Quantum Kiwi was also down at the time, yet our pingdom monitoring states we have had a 100% uptime on QuantumKiwi.com... Strange? We located the issue to being his IP blocked by our CSF WHM firewall which blocked him due to a connection limit of 64, He was then further blocked for 12 hours automatically by our firewall due to excessive attempts to access the server again. His IP was unblocked and added to the whitelist immediately.
21/08/2013 - IP was unblocked. Account has had an uptime of 99%. Datacenter outage of 10 minutes effected the account, other than that it was fine.
21/08/2013 - Email sent to client explaining in full why his system was blocked automatically by our systems - No reply.

Several weeks later, We get a notification of a blog comment - Stating from " Donald aka Scott Deleon " that Quantum Kiwi is a scam see here:


So, we decided to contact him via email and ask hey? Whats going on - Why post this stuff up when we didn't scam you, our firewall blocked you due to your system having too many connections?

We then get this reply;


We then contact him again, attempting to explain how and why his IP was blocked and that we are not scamming him...

Reply from " Scott Deleon ":


His latest accusation - spam:


What is really puzzling us is - Why would we want to scam someone for 2 weeks of web hosting when we have several hundred clients - a $4.95 plan is the smallest plans to us, We don't hold peoples services back 2 weeks so we can scam someone else....? Its really strange these accusations...

It seems that Scott, is really annoyed that his IP got blocked - Went to another host instead of sending in a support ticket, Now he has two web hosting plans to deal with -

Hes wanting a refund but didn't go the right way about it - So now hes on a rampage to take " Quantum Kiwi down ".


Now, after the recent email - We had a meeting and said look " We will give this guy a call, try and explain whats happened - If hes understanding give him an account credit of $30-50 to keep things all nice and comfortable. " Hah, that was a joke. Our CEO Logan called him - Well that was interesting.

Logan attempted to explain what had happened with the IP block, However " Scott " kept on talking over him and interrupting him - Accusing QuantumKiwi of being a scam.

Scott then threatened to " Take down Quantum Kiwi and let everyone know on the internet that Quantum Kiwi is a scam ".

Scott then hung up.


We have since made a decision to terminate Scott's services with us due to his abuse & accusations.

Our lawyers are looking into it, but really - I think people just need to watch out for this guy and his associates - NO business should be subject to abuse and/or false accusations by someone with a problem of their own.


Here at Quantum Kiwi we are respectful of peoples privacy however in this case, we are making scotts name public as we think its fair that everyone gets to see both sides - If we are being accused of being a scam...



Quantum Kiwi is not a scam, We have many happy clients and 2 weeks of hosting is well - FREE for anyone that wants to trial our PAID web hosting services.....


Best Regards,
Chief Administrator - Allan @ Quantum Kiwi






edit: His latest email: ( Accusing us of mis-treating him due to a Mental illness )