One thing that every freelancer learns early on is the importance of having a contract in place, because it’s often way too easy for clients to weasel out of paying for their services.

Every freelancer I know has a story about how they have had their work devalued, or been scammed out of their rightful wages by an unscrupulous operator.

That’s why we appreciate this story, in which a freelance web designer got a little petty revenge on a client who refused to pay.

Check it out.

Small business client goes no contact and nonpayment after my uncle makes her a website, so he shuts down her site in the pettiest way possible

Strap in, folks, this is a good one.

Ok to start, my uncle has been competent programmer for many years, at least since the earliest 2000s, and even coded a system for his company once, so it’s safe to say that he’s one smart cookie.

But one person thought she was smarter than him and that she could screw him out of a website, so my uncle got back at her.

When a client thought they could get out of paying by blocking htier web designer, they were in for a rude awakening.

So my uncle sometimes does odd-jobs for clients as a sort of side hustle, making websites, debugging and/or creating software, retrieving data that an intern misplaced, etc.

On one of these jobs he gets a woman that has her own small business( if i remember correctly he told me it sold beauty products and cosmetics like perfumes, colognes, make-up etc.).

She wants her website to have all of the bells and whistles so instead of going to one of those websites that lets you build one yourself she decides to get him to do it because of his programming knowledge.

She hired this man because of his programming expertise, but still thought she could pull a fast one on him.

So he makes her websites and includes just about everything: Links to various social media, The ability to make an account on the website, subscription services, everything.

But after giving it to her server, she locked him out and not only ghosted him but also blocked him on her personal & Business phones, so it’s clear that she had no intention of paying him the whole thing.

Cue the revenge.

But he was prepared for this kind of behavior. This is not his first freelancer rodeo.

So two things i should mention, 1) My uncle had her sign a contract which stated she would pay 1/4th the whole price in a lump-sum, which she did, 2) the contract stated she would pay in monthly installments(roughly 30 days) and promised repercussions legal or otherwise for non-payment.

There was a contract saying exactly what she owed him, and precisely when it was due.

So my uncle waits the 30 days, no payment, so he figures he should make due on his portion of the contract; inside the code of the website is a code snippet that my uncle calls ” a cyanide pill” which essentially checks a boolean variable “Payment” every 24 hours and if it’s false the opacity is decreased little by little.

But if it’s true then the entire opacity is restored; so basically if my uncle didn’t manually change it from his computer, the screen would just be white.

Turns out, he’d installed code on the website that would break the site unless she paid up.

She eventually calls him and threatens to sue him for sabotaging her business, my uncle reminds her that she signed a contract with a witness and legal council present so it’d be cheaper to just pay him; she instead did decide to try and sue him, but in court it was open and shut case since she signed the contract and she was ordered to pay the rest in a lump sum which put her in trouble because it ate away at most of her business’ profits.

When they ended up in court over the matter, the signed contract made it clear which party was in the right, no matter how petty the designer may have been.

In the comments, people agree that you never mess with your web designer.

Apparently such back doors are common features in website designs, which just goes to show you how widespread scammers are.

This revenge was a particularly clever one. But there are other methods that people have used that are equally petty and damaging to their business.

It’s important for people to pay their bills, and website designers definitely have a leg up when it comes to making sure their bills are paid.

Pay your freelancers.

Or suffer the consequences.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.