Short Summary: Jorge /
@Chileantiques stole
9000$ from me and 4 others, stopped any work in November 2021 and started to completely ignore us in January 2022. We paid him this money
specifically in advance so that he wouldn't need other projects to fund his living expenses and could focus on our work!
Longer Version:
Jorge said he could do Rolex 727 conversions for us and we agreed on a timeline / project plan from April to September. We initially paid him $1k each to start and he started out relatively motivated. He quite literally said that we should pay him this down payment so that he could focus on this project and wouldn't need to work on other projects for income.
However, what was a major red flag from the start was that as soon as he got payment, he started to disappear and progress became super slow again and he'd ignore messages asking about updates that he kept promising us would come "next week" and then all of a sudden share completely irrelevant pics to get our opinion on watch parts.
By September, he hadn't even started work that should have been finished by July. As we got increasingly frustrated, he always gave us excuses about his custody and divorce lawsuits that needed his attention, all while demanding more and more money from us. He always said we could always leave this project and he'd return the money. As soon as only one person in the group asked for his deposit back, he refused, left the WhatsApp group and completely ignored us and our requests to refund our money.
We even gave him the option that we
wouldn't pull funding if he just started to show continuous progress at a pace that we could agree on together (e.g. an update with pics every Thursday or every other Thursday even) and gave him plenty of time to get his head straight beforehand (>Month). This was several months after his supposed custody case.
He ignored this as well and became childish.
So in our book he
stole the money from us until we either get what we paid for or he returns the money. I don't care if his intentions are to "some day", "one day" or whenever pay us back. For what it's worth, he used someone else's PayPal Account to funnel part of the money (probably because his was banned) and also received some in crypto. Unfortunately, by the time the issues started, it was
already too late for chargebacks.
I really don't get Jorge,
he's destroying his entire reputation built over many years (albeit with a few hiccups along the way), which is his supposed main source of income and profession, which will cause him never to be able to do any business in the watch scene. In our case, he could so easily avoided this by just giving us an update once a week.
I don't get it, what else has he been doing all this time? From the looks of it, he's hasn't done anyone else's work either.
We are
looking at all options right now, one of us has litigation insurance that covers all legal expenses up to 1 million dollar per case, with full self-control over the case and own choice of counsel:
- One option is to pull the people who received the money on his behalf (Father, Friend, etc.) into it, in the hope that they will exert some pressure on him.
- Another option is to report him to the police and online fraud units in Chile (and also his launderers).
- In Europe it's possible to get something similar to an arrest notice against someone charged with a lawsuit he hasn't responded to or defended themselves against, so that he will be arrested if he crosses into Europe unless he pays whatever was determined after default judgment. I'm probably simplifying how that works, so don't quote me on the specifics, I'm just paraphrasing what a lawyer told me and did to someone in a different case where one non-EU party refused to take back unusable products from his client. Does that somehow work in the US as well?
- Can do the above to the people connected to Jorge via payments
From what we can tell, his Father is definitely not without means based his trades with expensive vintage watches, so it's surprising to us that someone from a well-off family in Chile would resort to scamming people when his family and friends are clearly connected to his deals. He's basically not just toying with his own reputation, but also his fathers, his cousins or whoever else lets him use their accounts.
Has anyone here been successful in getting things straightened out with Jorge in the past 4 Months? Any other suggestions what we can do?
