Francis Koenig / Adultvest and iPorn drama worth sharing

Commmoonn people thats the dumbest fucking letter requesting payment I have ever seen.

Man when I was reading that I was expecting something serious and at the end of it all that its over $10 an hour.

Fuck why are designers such idiots.

Seriously the O.P went off on a tangent about how they are ruining the industry being unethical blah blah blah.. over what I bet is a lack of proper communication of $10 an hour...

wtf.

That is the type of letter you send the owners of pornbb not some guy that owes you $250 bucks..

Kasey just a tip wait for your PMS to pass before you go further with this...

Commmoonn people thats the dumbest fucking letter requesting payment I have ever seen.

Man when I was reading that I was expecting something serious and at the end of it all that its over $10 an hour.

Fuck why are designers such idiots.

Seriously the O.P went off on a tangent about how they are ruining the industry being unethical blah blah blah.. over what I bet is a lack of proper communication of $10 an hour...

wtf.

That is the type of letter you send the owners of pornbb not some guy that owes you $250 bucks..

Kasey just a tip wait for your PMS to pass before you go further with this...

Seriously the O.P went off on a tangent about how they are ruining the industry being unethical blah blah blah.. over what I bet is a lack of proper communication of $10 an hour...

wtf.

That is the type of letter you send the owners of pornbb not some guy that owes you $250 bucks..

that sucks, misunderstanding started wars.

No winners here.

What's ethical about someone not sending the whole amount of an invoice? Francis shorted me $820. While that might not be a large sum in your mind, it is in mine. I live pretty simply, and expect people to keep their word. Francis negotiated in bad faith. Period.

i liked the unicorn header - and even more the bunny

Kasey, i run a design company, so i can feel your pain, but I am with Alien on this. Regardless of what the situation is, whether it's clear or misunderstanding, you can not legally and ethically fuck up someone's site just because you have access.

I am no lawyer but you got to be completely retarded to go and admit your actions in public, giving a cause for action in a defamation suite. You just signed yourself up for full bankruptcy.. showing damages would be easy, there is proof on this thread already.

We live in a legal society, and the way to solve it is to file a civil suite, in a small clams court to collect the funds if you are right, you won't find a Judge to get you paid on GFY.

Do you think there are many companies who would be willing to hire you knowing shall there be any kind of issue, the laundry will be on GFY and their reputation has a potential to be tarnished. Good luck getting jobs.

Lesson to learn regardless, get your paperwork straight before doing work to make sure there are no misunderstandings from any side.

Kasey, i run a design company, so i can feel your pain, but I am with Alien on this. Regardless of what the situation is, whether it's clear or misunderstanding, you can not legally and ethically fuck up someone's site just because you have access.

We live in a legal society, and the way to solve it is to file a civil suite, in a small clams court to collect the funds if you are right, you won't find a Judge to get you paid on GFY.

Do you think there are many companies who would be willing to hire you knowing shall there be any kind of issue, the laundry will be on GFY and their reputation has a potential to be tarnished. Good luck getting jobs.

Lesson to learn regardless, get your paperwork straight before doing work to make sure there are no misunderstandings from any side.

too bad, I missed it

I don't wish to take sides, but I find it funny how Francis changed the subject from the money he owes to the " jpeg/html swap" vandalism.

Best of luck!

Kasey, here are some points you should think about before you take this any further.

1) You could have easily called me to sort out this misunderstanding, but you didn?t. You still to this day have not called me.

2) You admitted above that you had been getting paid $50/hr on prior work. It was clearly a misunderstanding that could have been solved in one conversation.

3) If you wanted to change your rate, all you had to do was ask. You never once called me to discuss a new pay rate. You simply changed the rate on your bill and sent it in. I probably would have given you the raise in your pay if you would have asked for it before you started the project. Heck, I would have even given it to you after the fact if you were cool about it. Obviously you weren?t cool about it.

4) You're trying to lay the blame on Mike. You knew Mike joined iPorn only two weeks before you began work on the site. He had no knowledge of our prior arrangements or what you had been getting paid. Again, a situation where a simple phone call could have saved you a lot of grief.

The bottom line is that you made no effort to resolve the problem. You just reacted. What you did was unethical. Don?t try to make me look like a bad guy when I?m not the cause of the problem.

supertinymonster.com/iporn.jpg

the join now link went here:

supertinymonster.com/cheap.html

Kasey, here are some points you should think about before you take this any further.

1) You could have easily called me to sort out this misunderstanding, but you didn?t. You still to this day have not called me.
2) You admitted above that you had been getting paid $50/hr on prior work. It was clearly a misunderstanding that could have been solved in one conversation.
3) If you wanted to change your rate, all you had to do was ask. You never once called me to discuss a new pay rate. You simply changed the rate on your bill and sent it in. I probably would have given you the raise in your pay if you would have asked for it before you started the project. Heck, I would have even given it to you after the fact if you were cool about it. Obviously you weren?t cool about it.
4) You're trying to lay the blame on Mike. You knew Mike joined iPorn only two weeks before you began work on the site. He had no knowledge of our prior arrangements or what you had been getting paid. Again, a situation where a simple phone call could have saved you a lot of grief.

The bottom line is that you made no effort to resolve the problem. You just reacted. What you did was unethical. Don?t try to make me look like a bad guy when I?m not the cause of the problem. Vandalism and defamation of character is a serious issue and it leaves a permanent mark on your record. You could have a very hard time trying to find work. You are very lucky that I have no interest in going this route. Any other company would have already filed the papers. If anyone hires you in the future, my suggestion is to be upfront with them and if you have a problem, work it out in private.

Hi can I ask what is the best way to contact you.

We hired Kasey McMahon on several occasions to work on various design projects prior to her work on iPorn. We had been consistently paying her $50/hr and have always paid on time. It would be easy for me to produce records of this fact. Then she wrote us a bill for $60/hr and our accounting department brought it to me. We thought it was a mistake. I asked them to check the rates we had previously paid her. Kasey arbitrarily raised her rate. She never called me to discuss an increase in her pay rate. So we went ahead and paid her at the $50/hr rate. I would have agreed to the $60 rate if Kasey would have asked for it up front before starting the project. All she had to do was put in a call to me and talk about it. Instead she tried to be sneaky about it and slip it through the cracks. Now she went ahead and did something could put her in a lot of trouble. I would be surprised to see other companies jumping to hire Kasey after she?s shown everyone that she is willing to vandalize and slander a company over a misunderstanding that could have easily been cleared up with a phone call. Kasey this is your direct quote: ?I like to think that working in the adult business is akin to mainstream, but actions like yours make me think otherwise.? Kasey, you?ve obviously contradicted yourself. I?ve worked with a lot of great people in the adult industry. Your course of action is EXACTLY what gives the adult business a bad rap!

~Francis Koenig

mmmmmkay

Hi GFY folks -

Below is an email I just sent to Francis Koenig, President and CEO of Adultvest and iPorn. I believe it's worthy of being an open letter to this community. Cheers to all, and happy fourth.

Francis -

I received the check you sent, however, as Mike had warned me, you decided to cut the dollar amount for less than we had agreed upon.

So tell me, how is that justified in your mind? I had discussed my rate with Mike - I was quite firm that it was $60 an hour, and you guys had paid that rate for the prior work I had done on the iPorn site.

Mike called not once, but twice after I had sent my invoice and said that you had requested that I cut my rate. The first time I refused, on principal, because as I told Mike, we agreed on $60 an hour. Mike agreed and said he'd send out a check. Two weeks passed, so I emailed asking if the check had been sent. Mike called again, apologized for having to ask me again to cut my rate, but said it was coming from you. I agreed to take 10% off the top, and stated that I no longer wanted to work with you guys.

I sent in my invoice, forced '10% discount' applied, yet even after that you cut a check for less than that amount. That is not only unprofessional, it's unethical.

I like to think that working in the adult business is akin to mainstream, but actions like yours make me think otherwise. My only other experience working in adult has been as Creative Director with XBiz for a few years. Alec is a fair and honest businessman who treats his employees well. Clearly I was mistaken to take that experience and apply the same trust to your project.

What baffles me here is that you are doing this to an individual. You're not shorting a large company - you're taking money directly out of someone's pocket. I'm an artist that does design work to pay rent and keep up with my school loans. You decided to take over $800 off of my bill - that's a large cut for someone like me.

I, along with the rest of your team, put in the hours and many late nights in order to make sure that under a tight three-week deadline, with no real formulated idea of what you wanted the site to be, you had a site up by Erotic LA. It's interesting to me that you'd pay a mint for the 'iPorn' name, then not pay the people that work hard to make it a reality.

I like to think the best of folks, but you've made me realize that greed is an unfortunate part of human nature. I'm glad I'm not in your shoes, having to wake up every morning thinking about the people I've walked all over.

You have an excellent team - all individually good people. You should be thankful for that, but my guess is that if you've slighted me, I'm not the only one.

It's interesting that through Adultvest you also claim to manage other people's money as a hedge fund manager. I can only imagine what the accounting on that must look like.

An organization can easily be tarnished from the top down, and as you embark creating affiliate programs and the like with the 'iPorn' brand, know that reputation goes a long way.

What goes around, comes around. Good luck to ya.

Kasey

* Also, just a bit of advice - as you cheat webmasters going forward, I highly
recommend changing the passwords on the websites they've done work on.

Like I said before, the modifications were minimal and only to prove a point.



If it wasn't clear - I am not trying to get that money back. By posting this thread, I completely wrote it off. I posted it here because Francis was unprofessional and I figure the community has a right to know when those sorts of things go down. Something like this says a lot about character. Undoubtedly, if someone is willing to short a designer a few hundred dollars, it makes you question what other creative accounting is going on.



I'm not worried about it. I've done work with only two adult companies. The experience I had with the first was great. The experience with Francis has made me not want to pursue more business within the adult arena, so posting this to GFY doesn't do me any harm. I know there are a lot of good people in this business, unfortunately, I just had a brush with one of the dishonest ones.



Noted, but in all the years I've done freelance design work, this has never happened.

No, there aren't. I'm out $820. I ended my business relationship with Francis after Mike called twice and apologized profusely for having to ask me to cut my rate from what we had agreed upon. I simply do not want to do business with someone that negotiates in bad faith.

Swapping out a banner image is nowhere near wrecking a site, so I'll rest well knowing that I acted with integrity. It was really tempting, though, not to take the whole site down

Kasey, your best course of action would have been to call me and discuss the situation. I'm sure this ridiculous misunderstanding could have been resolved with one phone call. As it stands now, you have publicly admitted to Vandalism and have made efforts to slander my reputation and that of the company's I?m am placed in charge of. What you have actually done is you have shown the entire GFY community that you are a serious risk to any company who hires you.

Signing off,
Francis

Dont this guys have 6 billion or some thing like that and hedge fund of the year etc etc.

lolz at the francis guy battling piddly shit with a designer but going nowhere near the threads about anything of substance.