[clug] [OT] Ugly vicious swine Web developers

Scott Ferguson prettyfly.productions at gmail.com
Mon Aug 16 17:40:13 MDT 2010


 Good morning shiny, happy CLUGers :-)

Not entirely Off Topic as it involves Linux as a back-end, Joomla! and
Open licensed scripts...

Can anyone suggest a means of warning potential victims of unscrupulous
Web Site Designers/Developers?
Can anyone suggest a means by which victims of the same, can seek legal
redress/compensation?

One of my current clients contracted a company based near the Gold Coast
to design and develop a website for their company.
The client want a simple, mostly static site, of about a dozen pages.
The clients are good people, hard working, care about their employees,
and "don't know much about computer things" (it's relevant).

When they hired this company (I'll call them the Cartel 'cause it's part
of their business name) they asked me to look at the initial website and
tell them "what I think" (as a favour).
Being somewhat cynical I was immediately suspicious of a company that
uses the word Cartel as part of their business name. The website itself
was not impressive - inconsistent layout, minor spelling mistakes, a
mixture of absolute and relative links, failed to validate and had a lot
of dead links. But I've seen uglier, and messier, sites.

The hosting company (a local mob) seemed excellent, the techs are the
owners, and much of the back-end runs Linux.

The company doing the design and development were a different matter.
The more I looked at them (the principals) the uglier it got.
I discovered that the main principal had a string of previous companies
that had been de-registered - many of them suspiciously similar in name
to well known companies. All his references appeared to be from
relatives or created by himself (Linkedin etc). On the face of it he
appeared to change industry every other year. Accounting, marketing (an
sms advertising program for "escort service"), sales, meat export,
graphic design, web site development etc.

The cartel website is very basic - but set off alarm bells for me. It
contained a page of logos from companies the cartel alleged to have a
previous clients - all fairly large companies. When I checked I could
find no reference in those companies to the cartel having worked for
them. Worse the page of logos wasn't a page with the actual logos just a
picture of all the logos (with photoshop exif data). In my experience,
companies are rather strict about the versions of logos used.

I kept digging - found a couple of web sites that were attributed to the
cartel (for relatives of the main principal) but discovered that they
had been built very cheaply by overseas developers through contracting
site (odesk and others). No problems there... but why use a different
(off-the-shelf) company to do so? Turns out some of the contractors
weren't happy.

I documented all of the above and my suggestion (don't have anything to
do with them) to the clients (and they ignored me).

Some months (and 5 figures) later they told me they'd fired the company
- and asked if I could take over the site or recommend someone.
Now that I've looked at the backend of the site and heard more of the
clients woes I'd like to help them.

The client was told that the cartel owns the site - I've advised them
that is not the case - the cartel never provided the client with any
site documentation or passwords.... (I've recovered the necessary
passwords and locked out the various means of remote access).  I have
never seen a more borked backend! Both Joomla! and Mambo are installed,
with every bell, whistle and dancing bear. Obfuscated scripts which turn
out to have open licences - some running from off-site, a back up of the
main mysql db inside the main mysql db!, no site backups show in the
logs, huge error logs, insane file and directory permissions, more than
40 extensions, 22 templates, a recursive and addled directory structure,
htaccess rules that would delight a script kiddy, rss feeds, mass email
marketing plugins etc. Some of the non-functioning components have been
created in ffffrontpage, others don't work because the file was edited
(I suspect) in Notepad.

I'm not a lawyer but I suspect the client is a victim of fraud - that
the company contracted to design the site deceived them to gain a
financial advantage. The clients have been told by the cartel that they
need to pay more money to fix the site.
I can think of a number of reputable design companies that would quote
$12K less to build a working version of the site.

Thanks in advance for any useful suggestions


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