NOT HOT! Just FYI: Cyberwings - Received an email from DomainsPricedRight.com

[kbaxter]

Night201-

Thanks for that link. That is the funniest thing I've seen in a long time; it made my day!

I didn't join up with CW, but was pretty close to going for it. I'm watching all this with interest.....

GL All.

 

[theloneraven]

Originally posted by: slycat


how do u file a refund from paypal?...i didn't see any links..
i have $15 i want back...
2 accts with them...will close one and let the other one sit...

En, log into your paypal account, look under and find the link that says "Security Center". There's a "Buyer Complaint Form" on the right corner. The rest I think you can handle from there.

 

[Wolfgang]

RSG2,

No, I haven't vanished , just (1) been busy, and even more, (2) haven't had much to say.

I previously jumped in a lot because there were a lot of fairly easy answers (if often speculative, or sometimes more accurately counter-speculative) to many of the questions/accusations raised.

But I really don't have much in the way of answers for a lot of this recent stuff, regarding Shawn's history, etc. (I'm also not sure how to understand Shawn's answers, given his history of confusing language--I asked him for a clarification [did he think these newsgroup postings were recent when he said he hadn't posted in years, e.g.?], but haven't gotten it.) None of this proves CW will fail, but obviously it to some significant extent undercuts my premise (1) (from way back when in this thread), that Shawn is fundamentally honest. There may in fact be good answers, for all I know, but I don't have them, and will have to wait for Shawn to deal with them, if or when he chooses to. (No time soon, I'd imagine--for either commendable or condemnable reasons, depending on the truth.)

That brings me to the third reason for not doing much here lately: (3) It doesn't matter what goes on here. Either CW will come back up reliably, and Shawn and CW will be vindicated (to some extent, anyway--depending on how long they stay up), or it won't or will only briefly, and then the critics will be vindicated. Neither of these possibilities depends on what happens in this thread.

It's still my guess that they will come back, probably for quite some time--a lot will need to change if it's going to be permanent, but nothing that can't change--but I could be wrong, and only time, and not my opinion or anyone else's here, will tell.

 

[Hig]

Hi my name is Hig and I was addicted to cyberwings.........


I fell for the AYW lifetime for $40 plus a 2x ZAP @ $45.. So two days ago I sobered up from my addiction and disputed my paypal charges. Apparently, CEO has not taken off the approval on charge backs because mine is still pending his review. Go figure.... I am write paypal an email with a link to the horsehockey post to see what they say.

Wish me luck on my recovery.... Well I have one more thing to get off my chest I also have two $3.90 yearly accounts which Shawn says will be upgraded to AYW for free with more bandwidth and everything. I can't wait or well maybe I can........

 

[XFreebie]

shawnee can keep my $3.90 cuz its been over 60 days, but i want my $8 paypal back from his magical "zap your money's gone" upgrades

 

[Wolfgang]

One STRONG suggestion to those getting refunds: Don't only mention which accounts you're cancelling, expressly mention those you are NOT cancelling.

Because of the convoluted complication of all these sales and such--a real accounting nightmare, easy to talk about during sales, hard to figure out after the fact--it has happened once before that someone got a refund on some accounts, but had all his accounts cancelled.

(Eventually, the rest of the money was refunded too, but it took a lot of hassle. Complicated things happen very slowly at CW now, unless they're involved with DC stuff.)

 

[DaveSimmons]

Man, I never paid for a CW account but I almost think I should pay someone $3 for the entertainment value of this thread -- Laurie Anderson would approve of this saga as performance art, and Marti Noxon could script a season's worth of television from the soap opera.

150 GB SCSI, 10K EIDE, 30x arrays of 4GB drives and shipping the IP addresses by motor freight. The "reality" BS and parody BS blend into an amazing and amusing stew.

 

[amdskip]

I paid the $3 or whatever a long freakin time ago and never received my setup email, haha, it'd be pretty funny if he sued that dude on the turkey posting. Why doesn't he come post in this thread if he isn't a turkey

 

[MontyBurns]

PayPal doesn't like to process refunds. If they get dozens, or even hundreds, on cyberwings, he's going to have to set up a new account.

Likewise, complaining to your credit-card company will also put pressure on them. They hate chargebacks.

 

[stingygrrl]

I used a credit card and that was processed by 2checkout.com. I initially went to their site to see if they passed on the credit card # to CW or just the money after they process it. Never did find the answer, but I did find this about chargebacks. CEO shawn might be in for a big bill from 2checkout if there are a lot of reversals!!

-----------------------------

What is a chargeback dispute?
A chargeback dispute is a forced refund from a customer's credit card company. It occurs when a cardholder decides to formally dispute a charge on his/her credit card bill, often because someone else fraudulently used that cardnumber before the abuse had been discovered or reported. Chargeback disputes occur on less than 1% of all 2CheckOut transactions.

According to credit card association rules, Internet merchants must accept credit card fraud as part of the normal risk of doing business on the Internet.

The amount of credit card fraud you experience will vary according to the type of products you sell. Products which appeal to children, teenagers, and unmarried men will experience a higher degree of credit card fraud. Products which are purchased primarily by professionals, women, and families will experience a lower amount of fraud.

When an issuing bank sends a chargeback dispute, the bank also charges a research fee. This fee can range from $10 to $30 depending on the bank. 2CheckOut reserves the right to pass the bank's charge back fee on to client involved, at our discretion.

 

[MontyBurns]

2checkout has an extremely low tolerance for chargebacks. And yes, they can get very expensive with fees.

Something tells me that IF they get online again, it will be paypal only.

 

[SinMen]

If this ever turns out to be a scam, those who had defended CW ,after the first few sales when people started to point out this is too good be true, are as guilty as CEO. You had helped to fuel the fire, make sure people ignore the signs of a scam. And don't tell me it's only a bad business model.

 

[MontyBurns]

The cheerleaders certainly did a disservice. I really don't see why anyone without a connection to the company would have been pumping it for so long, even when so many things were going so wrong. All the speculation about how great it "could be," and how just maybe things weren't really as bad as they seemed. What good did it do? All it did was lure more people to sign up for this disaster.

 

[kermalou]

Originally posted by: SinMen
If this ever turns out to be a scam, those who had defended CW ,after the first few sales when people started to point out this is too good be true, are as guilty as CEO. You had helped to fuel the fire, make sure people ignore the signs of a scam. And don't tell me it's only a bad business model.

i my friend am guily as charged

 

[Jhill]

Every time I see this thread I think of that one part in Halo when that guys says

"WE'RE SCREWED MAN, WE'RE SCREWED!"

 

[Wolfgang]

Sinmen, I certainly agree, though I'd say the reciprocal is true too: if they come back up and last, then everyone who was smearing them--not just complaining, I mean, but smearing them--will owe them an apology too. (Just as they owe their customers an apology, many times over.)

If it's a fraud, then the "smears" weren't smears at all, just (surprisingly) fact-based satire and ridicule. But if it's not a fraud, then they were falsehood-based smears.

Only time will tell.

(That may liven things up here a bit. Will see if the CW servers are back up by Saturday, as Shawn promised. I won't say what I think regarding that, so as to better observe the fill-in-the-blank-with-whatever replies out there. )

 

[Brasscat]

Remember Wolfie - Shawn promised service restoration THURS-SATURDAY. I don't think we should continually hold that joker to the LAST DAY in his estimate. Hey, TODAY is Thursday

So I ran a trace and what do I discover? As of today no name server changes have been made (or at least propegated) for Cyberwings.

Interesting, since today, THURSDAY, was in CEO-Shawns timeframe for when their "new datacenter" is supposed to be "up."

You'd think that CEO-Shawn would allow enough time for propagation to occur, so that if Cyberwings actually made go live today DNS would be pointing to the new servers.

Or maybe CEO doesn't have the $8.95 fee for Go Daddy. Wait, nameserver changes are FREE!

 

[MontyBurns]

Wolfie, how exactly could the critics owe them an apology? Not sure if you've noticed or not, but their service appears to have collapsed, and as far as I know they still haven't sent a single mass e-mail to their customers. Is that any way to do business?

Your optimism is astounding.

(By the way, the new data center was to be live LAST WEEK, so he's already way past the "deadline." Just because he keeps pushing the deadling back, you think that means it hasn't passed...)

 

[Wolfgang]

Brasscat,

I'll sadly be the first to agree, that when Shawn says "Thu-Sat, Sat at the latest", he should be taken as saying something like "Monday at the earliest."

Maybe I'll be wrong here, but I'm not holding my breath.

I don't think it's a scam at all; but he does seem in a bit over his head at the moment.

Not only are there no (propagated) DNS changes, but AFAIK, the new IP range hasn't been released yet, when it was going to quite be some time ago "at the latest", as I recall.

Still: down is not out. Only time will tell.

 

[MontyBurns]

Originally posted by: Wolfgang

If it's a fraud, then the "smears" weren't smears at all, just (surprisingly) fact-based satire and ridicule. But if it's not a fraud, then they were falsehood-based smears.

WHAT??? I don't think it's a fraud. I just think it's one of the worst run companies I've ever dealt with, and I think they deserve just about all the criticism that has been posted here.

You're saying the two options are: It's a fraud, and the criticism is okay, or it's NOT a fraud, and somehow the criticism is not deserved.

Does "really bad company" = "fraud" in your book?

 

[Wolfgang]

Monty,

Cyberwings owes numerous apologies for failing to deliver service and for failing to reliably communicate with their customers. But if they come back, as I think they will (we'll see for how long), numerous people here will owe (and never give) apologies for myriad false accusations and innuendo.

And you find my "optimism" astounding? I think that's because you, like most people here, are inductively looking at just the last 3 weeks (or perhaps some odd combination of the last three weeks and stuff from several years ago).

Myself, I add the last year before this last month in too, where despite the hype, service was actually delivered by-and-large very successfully--and in that case, things look significantly better, not for the next short while (recent history is a better predictor for that), but for the medium term (where the last year is probably a better predictor).

So they may well fail, as I've said all along, but my guess is that they won't, not for the medium-term anyway. (Short term, yes, obviously--that's happening right now. Long-term? THAT is hard to say, since it's feasible in principle but will require numerous changes in the business.)

I probably won't comment much more on this today, since again, it's moot. Cyberwings will either come back soon, or not. OTWT.

 

[Wolfgang]

Monty,

One can be a complainer without being a smearer, and I was referring only to the smearers (even if there can be a fine line between the two).

And I think CW has been very poorly run as well, certainly lately. (Maybe covertly even more in the past, when they decided to rely on LS, though--someday those issue smay become clear. I have not seen any new mention of US Marshals on the CWstatus web site, though. May be just another classic Shawnism. ) They weren't set up well enough to handle either rapid scaling up OR externally induced problems, and that's the fault of management. And I seriously wonder how well thought through their sales were and are: it's one thing to have a loss leader for marketing purposes--it's another thing simply to operate at a loss in the course of business.

As I recall, even you think CW will be coming back online soon, from the VA Datacenter, right?

 

[geekender]

As I recall, even you think CW will be coming back online soon, from the VA Datacenter, right?

My vote is he is hopping a plane to Vanuatu.

 

[MontyBurns]

Exactly what false accusations and innuendo are you referring to? What exactly have people said that hasn't been true? (I mean people on this board... there are of course myriad things CW has said that turned out not to be true.)

And if you're simply referring to the comments labeling the company a "scam," I'd agree to a point, in that I don't think it's a "scam." But then again, what do you call it when a company collects thousands and thousands of dollars and then doesn't deliver services as promised? I can certainly understand why people feel scammed.

 

[labgeek]

I like quotes when they're appropriate. Here are 2 for consideration.

"He that?s cheated twice by the same man is an accomplice with the cheater." ? Thomas Fuller

"How many times do you get to lie before you are a liar?? ? Michael Josephson, 20th/21st-century American ethicist