There’s nothing worse than wasting hours of time on a client that refuses to pay. A civil court case may be in order, but these workers decided to exact their revenge in their own unique way.
All stories have been edited for clarity
A Permanent Reminder
“My uncle’s ex-girlfriend was an all-around horrible person. She was an abusive woman who got my uncle into bad crowds and legal trouble. She dabbled in so many illegal substances from A to Z. She was also heavily tatted.
There was a tattoo artist who was a family friend. I’ve always regarded him as a great dude who did insane work. My uncle’s ex asked him to do a piece for her. Ironically, she wanted huge, intricate angel wings across her back. The tattoo artist agreed and quoted a price.
It took several sessions across weeks for him to get close to finishing the tattoo. Meanwhile, my uncle’s ex-girlfriend repeatedly postponed the payment. The tattoo artist was chill but encouraged her to try to get him the money before their last session.
Well, during their last session, my uncle’s ex-girlfriend announced that she still didn’t have the money, and more importantly, WON’T have the money. Like, ever.
Our friend the tattoo artist had been played. He had no collection agency that could help him out, and no refusal to continue. Instead of getting angry, the artist smiled, waved it off, and said, ‘Alright, well let me add the final touches. No charge.’
Of course, my uncle’s ex-girlfriend was stoked.
So, right between those gorgeous angel wings, right along her spine, the tattoo artist drew a massive veiny male appendage proudly standing at attention. My uncle’s ex-girlfriend saw it in the mirror when he finished was LIVID.
But hey, what’s she gonna do?
She didn’t pay him and wasn’t going to pay him, and expected hours and hours of work.
You give a lot of trust to someone when they take a needle to your skin to lay down something permanent.
Don’t stiff your artists.”
Copy Cat
“I’m a web designer.
I once had a client who decided he didn’t want to pay the full price for my services AFTER he signed the agreement. He then only paid the fifty-percent deposit after I sent him the beta version on my server. The client took that link to other designers and asked them to build it for cheaper. When he found a designer who would, he told me he was no longer needing a website for his business and wanted to terminate.
When I said he was on the hook for the amount, he ignored me for a week and then told me he hated the website. I sent collections after him and the agent found out he had another designer working for him. This new designer charged three-hundred fifty bucks for a complete website with a year of hosting and SEO.
What happened next is phenomenal.
The new designer couldn’t copy my website, so he provided an HTML (non-responsive, to boot) website instead. The collection agent gave me the new website and when I looked, it was okay looking. I checked the source and right in the header tag, it said, ‘mirrored from…’
His designer copied the code, pictures, slogan, and favicon from another company. Being the good little designer I am, I contacted the company and asked if they knew their website had been copied. Obviously, they did not. I sent a bunch of screencaps and information to them.
The owner of the website then contacted my ex-client and ripped him a new one. The client threw the designer under the bus, so the company owner called the designer next. The owner of the company threatened corporate lawyers on him.
A few days later, the website was offline. By the following morning, a new website was up that was again mirrored from a hair & beauty salon in Las Vegas.
So I called the web designer of that website and let him know.
‘Of all the websites I’ve done, they copied that one?’ The designer said with a chuckle. He then called the designer and the designer responded by removing the “mirrored from” tags in the code. The original designer informed me he was going to be doing a little research and starting the process for the theft of intellectual property soon.
Because I’m a horrible person, I went through the thieving designer’s profile and found a few more copied websites, and sent screencaps of pages and the code to each of the original owners, as well as information on what to do. If someone wanted to copy code and learn from it, fine. But don’t sell someone’s hard work as your own.
At this point, I didn’t even care if I got my payment from my ex-client. The entire ordeal was very amusing.”
“In the early 2000s, I worked for a family-owned landscaping business. One day we got a call from one of our ads to go do some landscaping work for a guy who happened to live about a mile away. We didn’t have to spend much on gas, but we had to sacrifice our Labor Day weekend to do the job since it was extensive in nature.
The client asked us to put in a raised bed that essentially wrapped around his entire house. He wanted the bed to be built with landscaping bricks and wanted us to copy a style that his neighbor had done. When we tried to discuss payment, the client kept giving us the runaround. However, because we were in a desperate situation financially, we got fooled into doing the work with no agreed-upon labor fee. This was our mistake and one that was never made again. We were just happy to have some work.
We spent two full days working our butts off in the middle of summer to get the job done. We were using our tools, truck, and time, grinding away. At the same time, we kept wondering why the client was acting so shady.
Finally, on day three, near the end of the day, I was fed up with the runaround and knocked on the door to confront the client about our compensation. Almost immediately, the client swung open the door and started getting aggressive.
‘Now I’m not gonna pay you at all!’ The client screamed, immediately escalating the situation.
I grabbed my friend and brought him onto the front porch where we spent thirty minutes arguing with the client. Then the client decided he was only going to give us seventy bucks for the work. Seventy bucks to split between two guys after three days of labor.
After hearing that, we loaded up our truck and all our tools. We then waited for the guy to come out with our cash. After several minutes, the client came out with a huge wad of cash but proceeded to only hand over seventy dollars.
We collected our money and grab our last item, a tarp. We had been using a huge tarp to put weeds, grass, and extra dirt on to make our lives easier since we didn’t have a wheelbarrow at the time. The accumulated mound on this thing had to have been 4 feet high. We dragged it into the middle of his front yard and dump the tarp.
Once the client saw what was happening, he started begging us not to do it. He even offered to give us ‘a few more dollars.’ My coworker and I looked at each other and shrugged. We were well beyond an agreement at that point.
We loaded up and peeled out.
My friend’s mom was also a landscaper. She heard our story and offered up some excellent revenge advice. One idea she had was to take the backpack sprayers we had, fill them with a warm saltwater mix, then ride over and spray his yard. We planned to do this about two months later. When the time came, we executed the plan late at night, around 2 AM. We parked down at the pool parking lot, walked down to his house, and absolutely bombed this dude’s yard.
We came back about a month later and everything was dead or dying; flowers, grass, small trees, all of it.
Screw with the guys that are doing your yard work? Screw your yard.”