I hate to do this but I don’t really have a choice. If you work with Ashish Tiwari of Indore India, be warned. I hired him to create a payment gateway module for a Magento store I’ve been working on for a customer. He indicated that it would take a week or two of part time work and he’d have it ready. $800 later (on a $1300 website gig) it looked like he had finished because I was able to place the order in Magento and it went through successfully.  Shame on me for not testing more thoroughly. All he did was make it work on the front end. The money from the test order never made it to the site owner’s account. What’s worse? The code he added to the back end caused all of the admin section to malfunction. I couldn’t even disable the custom payment module he had installed. I got errors left and right, all pointing back to the module code he had added. It took me a week or two to realize that it didn’t actually work because I was busy creating stylesheets and graphics to spiff up the site.

Obviously, I began emailing Ashish Tiwari to find out what was going on and why it wasn’t working. It was at this point that he went AWOL. Gone off the face of the planet. No replies. Ever. Period. I had hired him via a site called oDesk, which I’ve used quite a bit before and since. oDesk has, in my opinion, a poorly thought out rule that disallows leaving feedback after 14 days from the time the other party leaves feedback. So he quickly left good feedback for me (why wouldn’t he? I just gave him $800 for nothing!) and closed the project, telling me he’d finish it offline for free. I thought he had finished the payment module and he had been offering to do some of the front-end work, too. I didn’t leave feedback right away because he kept promising to do extra work for free and I worried that leaving negative feedback for not following through would only ensure that he never did follow through. Aaah, what a sucker I was. The 14 days lapsed (I wasn’t aware of the 14 day rule at the time), he got his money and I had NO way to warn others or leave any feedback for him. I contacted oDesk about this and they basically told me to be more careful next time. Gee, thanks. So that’s the gist of the nightmare I’ve been through. Today’s lesson?

DON’T DO BUSINESS WITH ASHISH TIWARI OF INDORE INDIA!

I’m writing a post about this in hopes that others will be warned. I literally have no way to warn people on oDesk since they’ve removed that right from me. Ashish, feel free to refund me any time, bud!

PS – One more sketchy thing that raised a red flag was that he booked most of his hours offline, claiming that his internet connection was spotty. oDesk requires that contractors stay logged in while working so it can capture a screenshot of the work they’re doing for the client every ten minutes. Shockingly, I hardly had any screen shots to see. I took his word for it. Lesson learned.

Peace out.
– Nils