Let me try and boil a long story down to something a lot shorter and to the point... I was conntacted some MONTHS ago buy a guy (who shall remain nameless) to build him an ecommerce website - nothing odd about that you are thinking, and you would be correct... I get contacted all the time asking for quotes, ideas and solutions...

I agreed a price with this guy - a fair price because he was a lead from someone that I knew, so as a favour (and the hope of maybe more leads in the future) I discounted the price...

Now my first mistake was to not really bother about an upfront deposit, after all I knew where the lead came from so it was "in the bag..." right? Well actually no... because I am now at the very uneasy point of having built 75% of the website (including custom coding and a forum integration) without a sinlge penny in the bank.

The guy has disappeared off the face of the planet leaving unpaid invoices and a bitter taste in my mouth - so I must appologise to all those genuine people out there who now have to pay a 50% deposit before I will even turn my attention to building your website, it's morons like the guy above who spoil it and make people very un-trusting.