NRGServers.com license termination

[Flagship]

NRGServers license termination coming soon.

First let me start by saying how sorry I am about the number of people who are being affected by the problems caused by the owner NRGServers.com.

For a little over a week now we have been getting reports such as the following:

1. NRG customers existing servers going offline and never coming back up. This complicated by the fact that the customer gets no reply from NRG’s support email address.

2. New customers paying for a server but not receiving any of the details such as hostname, port number, admin password, etc.

3. To make matters worse NRG is now 4 weeks past due on their Ventrilo license fee as of this writing. And that’s just for August. We hold little hope of receiving it or September’s license fee either.

Despite repeated attempts to contact the owner via email for about a week and half, and via phone for the past two weeks with no success, we have not been able to find out what the actual problem is. Every time we call the phone number we have on record for them all we get is a busy signal no matter what time of day it is.

Some of you might remember a similar experience with NRG back in January 2007. Thankfully we were able to get it resolved thanks due to the help of the folks at PayPal. I was also given assurances by the owner of NRG that these problems would never happen again. Sadly this has turned out to be false.

NRG has been a licensed Ventrilo hosting company since Dec 2003 and always paid their license fee on time. They also experienced remarkable growth since then. While not exactly known for the best service in the world they usually did a good job of running their business.

We are totally mystified as to why the owner would treat his customers this way and us along with them. We have no idea why he would go out of his way to ruin his business like this. Rest assured he will be held accountable eventually.

Having said all of this I want every to know that NRG will be losing their license. However, due to the number of customers whos servers are still working we will leave the license intact until Friday October 12th, unless we are given reason to terminate it sooner.

We strongly encourage you to take this time and switch hosting companies before all of the servers are shutdown.

Despite no replies from NRG via email you should at least make an effort over the coming days to request a refund from them for any unused portion of your server if it was paid for more then 1 month in advance. If after several days you do not get a reply or a refund you should contact PayPal or your Credit Card provider and report the transaction as “Service not rendered”.

In either event NRG’s license is done. Sadly we are being forced to contact our attorney on this issue. I just now sent an official request for help to our account manager at PayPal. With any luck she will be able to aid in getting refunds processed and any possible legal action necessary regarding NRG servers.

We will expand on this thread as more details become available.

Again, my deepest apologies to all of you that have been hurt by the owner of NRG Servers. You are not alone.

[Flagship]

I spoke with my contact at PayPal just a few minutes ago.

While there is no definitive answer on how they intend to handle refunds or if they intend to pursue legal action against the owner of NRG it is very important that you lodge a complaint against NRG for any payments that you have made to them via PayPal.

The more complaints they receive the higher probability that they will step in and attempt to rectify the problem. I can not stress this enough. If you paid for a server for more then one month in advance, paid for a new server and never received the server details, your service was cut off due to the license termination or your server went offline without notice then please lodge a complaint with PayPal as soon as possible.

If you paid with a credit card (were not sure if NRG even accepted that kind of payment) then you should contact your credit card provider and report the NRG transaction as "Service not rendered" or what ever most applies.

[Flagship]

I just wanted to add some details for those people who don't quite seem to understand the real problem.

The owner of NRG Servers was already past due on license fees, and as mentioned in the first post above was not answering any emails and his phone was off the hook and still is as of this writing.

We have suspend NRG's server license before with the most recent event being August 30th of this year. After being offline for 4 hours the owner of NRG had caught up on his license fees and called me personally begging that I turn his servers back on and that NRG be re-listed on the hosting page. After being assured that we would have no further problems I decided to re-enable his servers and re-list him.

Well, here we are again with his license suspended but its been 32 hours since the suspension and no email, no phone calls, no nothing. If he really cared about his customers he would have done everything humanly possible to make contact with us. As mentioned above he knows my phone number.

So, from these facts alone we can safely (but not positively) assume that the owner of NRG Servers has either:

A) Skipped town.
B) Is incapacitated.
C) 6 feet under.

If I was a betting man, which I'm not, my money would be on (A).

Now you can see why we were left with no choice. Despite noticing payment problems a month ago, rather then shutdown the servers we chose to wait and exhaust all possible avenues and mechanisms to establish contact with him. This included enlisting the help of PayPal and his account manager. (Note: We did this last year and January of this year and it worked then). However, even they were not able to make contact this time as far as I know.

From this we conclude that he has skipped town.

Now you need to understand that if NRG was not paying us then he obviously would not be paying the data centers where he rents computers and bandwidth that are used to host the server you are paying for. This means that the data centers will eventually switch off these machines and leave you hanging and without any form of notice what so ever. At the very most you would have had anywhere from a few more days to a month before the data center powered off NRG's machines. Again, you would have been without service and without notice.

By us suspending/terminating the license we were able to inform you what is going on and direct you to this forum and this specific thread. Had your machines been switched off all you would have gotten from the Ventrilo client is a "Unable to connect" message. At this point you would have gone to the NRG website and tried to send support messages to an email server that isn't being monitored by anyone. Again, based on the fact that no one has been able to contact NRG.

Please keep in mind that I have no other way of contacting the customers of NRG Servers. We do not have access to the customer list of any of the licensees. We never have and we never will. It’s not our place to have that level of information. The only way to get the word out was to start this thread and telling people that the servers will be switched off soon.

Had we been able to make contact with the owner of NRG we would have told him that if you aren’t going to pay the license fee then you need to inform your customers that they need to start looking for a new hosting company and we’ll even let you continue running the servers for 2 more weeks. Given his size we would have preferred this route to anything else, even knowing full well we were never going to see any of the license fee. But we would have insisted that he give pro-rated refunds to those people who paid for more then one month.

Suspecting that his ever decreasing prices were probably making it impossible for him to financially continuing to run the business he might not have had the funds to make these required refunds as mentioned above. So, rather then act like a man and go out with a semblance of dignity it appears it was easier for him to skip town (assuming this is what has happened).

But as mentioned in the first post we have not been able to contact him for over a month and we don’t expect we ever would be able to until we are able to have him located and arrested.

In the past 24 hours, and with the help of some very cooperative and understanding NRG customers, we have learned a few things about how PayPal is going to handle “possible” refunds from there end.

1) If you were paying NRG via PayPal’s subscription service then cancel it immediately. At the most you’ll be out one months rental fee but even then PayPal might refund the whole thing. See the following steps.

2) If you made a payment in the past 30 days then make a claim on it. PayPal might very well honor it and refund the entire thing.

3) If you paid for more then 1 month in advance and did so beyond 30 or 45 days ago then PayPal will say that it’s not refundable.


Note: Even if PayPal says a complaint can not be made beyond the 30/45 day period, please make the complaint anyway. They will use the number of complaints for any potential legal action against the owner of NRG and it will influence the decision making process. As the saying goes: Just do it.

If you call PayPal directly the first line support/complaint department people will give you a standard answer of it is not refundable past the 45 day period. If they do please ask to speak to a supervisor or manager. PayPal has been fully briefed about the problem but it might take a manager to actually help you.

Also, if you used a credit card to make the payment, just through PayPal, then you should also contact your credit card provider and tell them that NRG Servers failed to provide the service that you paid for. Please be honest with them and tell them what you paid, for how many months and how many months remained on the rental so that they can pro-rate the refund.

So, the owner of NRG servers has harmed:

1) You the NRG customer
2) Flagship Industries the makers of the software,
3) The datacenters hosting the machines and bandwidth
4) PayPal.

We will be discussing legal and law enforcement options with our attorney this coming week.

On a positive note: I wanted to thank all of the other Ventrilo licensees for helping out on the forums and for making specials available to all NRG customers in an effort to help these people make the transition. Without you and the cooperative NRG customers the past 24+ hours would have been a lot harder. My sincerest thanks.

I will add to this thread as more information and suggestions become available.

--Flag

Edit-1: Grammar and spelling.