Con Artists

These con artists go out of their way to make your life miserable by repeatedly lying to you regarding progress on your project. You see, they outsource all your work. Their business model is a small business dealing solely with outsourced contractors -- usually the Philippines or India. Really, there are only a handful of people that actually run the business, everyone else is hundreds, if not thousands of miles away. Are they competent contractors? Do they know how to edit and assess Ph.D. level work? Of course not! But you won't know that until you've remitted payment. They were tricky about accepting payments anyway, since they dealt solely in cash and cashier's check. You see, credit card purchases had the legal backing of the credit card company and that would be WAY too many issues.

I don't know anything about interaction with the clients, as I never did any of that interaction. The work was definitely outsourced, often on a super-tight time scale (and as I mentioned in the link above, they definitely BS'ed clients about the status of their project, but in the end, it seemed like deadlines were met, and this was annoying to me as a worker, but it didn't seem abnormal as compared to my mechanic who says "oh yeah I'm looking at it today" or your tenant who says that the check is in the mail), but I never heard anything about the Philippines or India. I was in the US. Everyone I ever dealt with at the company was intelligent and had an understanding of the appropriate mathematics to analyze the data at a level appropriate for the projects at hand, typically PhD theses in the humanities.

I can't speak to the payment processing or the business side of things, but I was always treated well (other than getting a fair amount of work that required quick turn around) and I was always paid promptly.

I had no interaction with Barron (I preceded him), and I had limited interaction with SoB. Most -- if not all -- of my business was handled through a project manager at the company who worked his ass off doing the same work I was doing, and we gchatted/aim'd about the projects frequently.

While outsourcing data analysis for a PhD thesis seemed odd to me, I was assured that this was relatively commonplace in the humanities. I have no idea if that is true. But nothing about the company seemed like a scam to me. 

However, I only worked there for 2 months, perhaps on a dozen or so projects. I was a broke grad student trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, whether to finish grad school, etc.

I'm happy to answer some questions here if people have them. I'm pretty surprised to hear about all of this, especially SoB's shady past. It never even occurred to me to check. How naive...