At this point, I have stepped "outside of my box" as the OP of this thread and my personal issue with Reptster/David Young, so my responses are now as a concerned reptile breeder, not a person who has a debt with Mr. Young that has gone unsettled. I wanted that said first.
My biggest concern here is something that was alluded to earlier in this post, and Matthew and I are seeing just how easy it is for Mr. Young to take advantage of people now in a whole new way. We had a long talk about it last night, and this, my friends, is scary....
At this point, it would be fairly easy for Reptster to disappear off the face of the planet, claim that UPS and them could not reach an agreement, and say "sorry folks, nothing worked out the way we planned." Forget the fact that he apparently has not paid the bills to FedEx with the money people were sending him TO pay FedEx (even though that's pretty huge IMO), forget the other issues with non-payment, forget the refund issues he had, forget all of that. HE HAS PEOPLE'S CREDIT CARD INFO and could easily walk away with all of that now. That is scary. How many hundreds or thousands of credit cards does he have access to that he could hold onto for awhile, not doing anything with it, then suddenly, after being gone for awhile, decides to use that valuable information and people get screwed? Will they even link it to the fact that they gave that information over an unsecured connection a few months or a year ago to that site if odd charges start popping up? More than likely no, as people tend to forget those silly things (even I don't know how many websites have my information when I order online anymore). That's life in the internet age for just about everyone, nothing wrong with it when proper security measures are used to protect our information.
My suggestion to anyone that submitted credit card information to Reptster - get smart now and cancel those cards and get new ones. Sure, it is a pain and could be for nothing in the end, it could be just dumb luck that this is all happening, but what if it is not? Most of us wouldn't take that chance if we submitted information to a site that we found out got hacked, I personally wouldn't now when something this huge is happening either, knowing the security issues involved.
The other issue that is still looming over me is the issue that FedEx has not been paid long enough for them to put Reptster in collections. Now, Reptster has not even been around for a year yet - the site launched the shipping things in about, what, March (someone please correct me if I am wrong, I am not sure of the exact date)? Most places don't even START bugging you for money if you are less than 3 months behind on a bill - ever get behind on your car payment? (Disclaimer here - this is all guesswork, and nothing I am about to say is FACT, but is scary to think about the possibilities). So, that would put us back to...July that things stopped getting paid if FedEx gave him 3 months from now. Like Matthew said to me, if this whole deal with FedEx WAS legit, he probably had some deal worked out with them on payments, maybe even a 60-90 day "same as cash" deal...lots of big corporations do that, why wouldn't FedEx work something like that out with Reptster since everything ELSE was such a special deal? So that could put us back to as early as - check this out - April, maybe May. Which means that it is very possible that Mr. Young has been accepting money from customers that was SUPPOSED to be paid to FedEx for almost 6 months now and putting it in his pocket. Hell, even at 3 months, that is a lot of money if his shipping claims are correct. Before this post was ever started, I know that Reptster WAS doing quite a lot of shipments, but this post was only made 6 weeks ago. If this collections issue goes back 6 months, Mr. Young was certainly making some good money by not paying FedEx, wasn't he?
And I guess the last thing that is bothering me so much is this idea of him just up and switching to UPS - is UPS aware that Reptster is having financial issues with FedEx and their special arrangement? Yes, Mr. Young has been talking about the deal with UPS for awhile now, so this is not "new news" to anyone, but this sudden "oh my god hurry up and get it done" thing sounds fishy to me. If UPS was ready to come on board months ago, why hasn't the programming been done, or at least close enough where they can give a timeline on how long it will be until they are back up and running. Nope, all that the public who has been relying on him and his promises to ship without certification is "we will be back when we are back, sorry for the inconvenience" type of crap. Again, a perfect cop-out for NEVER coming back onto the scene and leaving a ton of people out in the cold.
I personally am still IP banned from the forums, so cannot keep up with any information Mr. Young posts on his site. I think that SOMEONE needs to be keeping up on this, and possibly posting any new information here for others to see that may not be apart of his website or who are in situations like myself. I find it interesting that on one page, he states "issues with FedEx" and then in his forum (as posted on BP.net), he equates the issues to how badly their service affected ONE customer. ONE breeder/shipper got him to shut down this huge asset to the community until he got UPS on board...I wonder how many people are really buying that load of crap. I doubt FedEx is...
Kelly Kordek
Sure would suck for them to start getting critical with existing good standing accounts because of this fools greed.
