 Refuse to pay? You'll pay in blood. There are people out there, willing to call in your help and hire you, no matter how good you do, they will find a way to rip you off and refuse to pay afterwards. In this episode, they'll pay either way. Squatters refuse to pay, law revokes their freedom. Client refuses to pay after service, their clients get a bad aftertaste. Install a wood stove without paying up, receive a smoke grenade and a company owner stops paying salary and steals, so karma made him lose all. Naturally, viewer discretion is advised. These revenge acts might be disturbing to snowflakes. Last summer I bought a house trailer and decided to rent it out. It needed some work so I posted two months free rent for putting carpet down in the living room, hooking up the hot water heater and putting in a toilet. Got a nice couple with a newborn willing to do it. Great. No lease. Month to month. No security deposit and the rent was $450 a month. The deal was that they would do the work, so I didn't ask for rent for two months. Everything was fine. Side note, there are a few little state laws that come into play. If you don't pay rent for three consecutive months you are considered a squatter, which means the landlord doesn't have to fix the property and can actually padlock it and deny you entry. I won't explain the eviction rules and violations here, let's say it's up to the judge really. Fast forward five months and still no rent money. Yes, they had a newborn, they were young and didn't have a lot of money, but the husband can spend $1,500 on a new engine for his project car. They can afford to go out to eat and spend money on electronics, but no rent. So after that third month I did nothing. The weather was turning cold. I didn't put in the furnace like I promised and if they hadn't had a newborn I would have padlocked the house. They were bragging about their tax refund, I gave them a shot to catch up and they basically said that they knew their rights and were in a rent strike, illegally I might add. I'll explain later. COVID happened, husband got laid off so I gave them a break. When he went back to work I asked for rent again and was told to frick off. I finally had enough. I told them they had 14 days to get out or I was doing a formal eviction and seeing he was on house arrest he knew what that meant. I honestly was trying to keep him from having to go back to jail and keep an eviction off of their record. I was trying to be nice and civil so they would leave and I would cut my losses, until I checked the property. Everything inside was removed. Everything they got free rent for was gone. I got pissed and filed for a formal eviction. It didn't go as they hoped. They said I didn't provide heat so they went on a rent strike. Only they didn't file that with the courts or hold the money aside. They just thought they could stop paying rent. What they put into the trailer was less than the rent. The judge agreed with me. The squatter started slamming my character in court so I replied with, well, you didn't tell me you were going on house arrest when you rented the property before then the judge looked bored, but now he perked up. He asked them if that was true, they responded that it was and he was ready to make his ruling. I received 15 months rent back at $450 a month and $2,000 in damages, because the way they removed the stuff they damaged a lot of things. As for him, the judge said he had no choice but to turn the eviction over to his parole officer. Fast forward to this month. His house arrest was violated and he was arrested. They actually had the nerve to ask me to speak on his behalf. I didn't. Ruling was his remaining six months are now being spent in jail, they have a bad eviction on their record and they owe me money. Know the law before you play the game. So, I'm a 17 year old web developer who can make basic websites and stuff to earn money for video games. The job's pretty easy for the pay. I get picked up by some local bakery so people could pre-order cakes and stuff online. Took a few hours to puke out a functional back end and a day to make it all pretty and smooth running. I had agreed for basically $10, which is insanely cheap even for India, but all I need is video game money, so I'm good with that. When I'm done with the job, they needed to purchase the domains and a server, which I explicitly told them, you pay me 10, and use another 10 to buy a domain and 5 to rent servers. Total is $25. They give me $15 so I could set their stuff up. Once the website was fully operational, I asked for my money. But apparently they didn't want to pay because, if I wasn't hosting the server anyways, why do I need compensation? You know, because apparently time has no value. The thing was I could still access the server as I had the credentials for the server. So I go home, log in and make one tiny change. The way the website works is that there's a customer page which shows your orders and there's a page for the store owners to see orders, payments, etc. Here's what I did, added a small and conspicuous may contain semen warning in all product details and the page where it shows the order confirmations to the customer, some options are changed with semen, so like semen frosting, by random. The website went down in about a week and they're back selling on Facebook. Getting someone complained or something. A few years after I started my business, I was asked to clean up and optimize a number of PCs in multiple locations, as well as set up some forms and templates for a new client who owned a local restaurant. The work, all labor apart from a little travel, was performed over the space of a month due to scheduling conflicts and school holidays, but on completing the last of it, the client confirmed verbally that he was happy with all I'd done, and to go ahead and send an invoice. I duly emailed an invoice for a sum just in excess of $400. I waited for payment, never heard anything, sent reminder emails, called and left messages, but no response. Eventually a couple of busy months had passed and I met the client by chance in the local supermarket. On asking why he'd not paid or been in touch, he said that all the PCs were as bad as they had been before I'd started, and that he had tried to contact me with no success. Because my landline and mobile phone had caller display as well as answering services, and there had been no emails, I knew the latter was BS, and as any PC user knows, a system can easily go back to pot if the user bad habits don't change. So I contacted a local debt collector, gave him the details, printouts of my call logs and post-invoicing emails, and he took them to the restaurateur. On his return his words were he's not disputing the invoice, he's saying that the work wasn't done right, so it's his word against yours. I queried if it was worth taking the guy to small claims, to which the debt collector said, even if you could prove he confirmed he was satisfied with the work, they might insist you get his computers back to their pre-invoice state again, do you really want to spend more time doing that? Of course the answer was no, so I stood it over in my mind and came up with a plan. At this point it was late November so, creating two throwaway email accounts in female names, I got in touch with the restaurant to book a large party for Valentine's night the following February. I put it down as, my husband's surprise 40th birthday party, confirmed that my husband's sister, and cc'd her in the message with the other throwaway. Said I couldn't make the journey north, but would happily pay the $10 ahead deposit as her share towards the night. Of course, as time went on the ideas grew arms and legs. The numbers attending increased, until the owner suggested he'd reserve the whole restaurant for the evening, and they'd happily arranged the seating to suit us. But could I ensure the deposit was sorted ASAP please? Of course I confirmed that the sister was a scatterbrain and that I'd ensure the check was with him very soon. He emailed the sister using the cc address and she confirmed it had been posted. To keep him on side, I asked for a proposed menu in advance so that I could send it to all the attendees for pre-ordering. Naturally they were delighted that they'd know this as it makes their life much easier. Consequently the numbers for all three courses were emailed in, with a few fussy eater variables thrown in for good measure. Needless to say by the beginning of February he was getting quite antsy about there being no sign of the deposit, but I reassured him that the sister's check must have been lost in the post, so she'd send another by special delivery, if they could ensure someone was there to sign for it. I knew the owner lived about 25 miles away, and the restaurant didn't open till 5 p.m., so he'd have to come in very early and hang around waiting for it. A week before D-Day and he'd obviously had enough. He emailed in a spat saying they'd turned away numerous inquiries, had no deposit, and could no longer hold back on taking other bookings. This time I didn't bother replying. My part was done. My wife and I were booked in at another restaurant close by for our own Valentine's meal, after which we took a walk past the restaurateur's business premises to see just two cars in their parking lot, one of which was his. I'm not sure how much he must have lost out on that night, but knowing his prices I'd bet it was significantly more than the $400 plus I'd invoiced him. Of course lessons were learned by me too, get written or emailed confirmation of job satisfaction for one, and not letting new clients go unbilled for too long was another. Naturally I had no hesitation letting all and sundry know how he'd behaved either, so he was blacklisted, or forced to pay up front for any work, by IT and other professionals I knew locally. A friend of mine used to install wood stoves and sell firewood. He still sells firewood but stopped bothering with wood stoves. This one guy bought a wood stove and wanted it installed. My friend did this but told him he would need a higher chimney for better air drawing. The guy refused it, I'm assuming maybe he didn't want a higher chimney for the look, and my friend kept insisting. The owner said no and when the wood stove was done, he complained it was hard to get a fire going due to the chimney being too short, leading to poor drawing of air. My friend came with a chimney extension and it worked fine, but he decided he didn't want to pay still, even though the job was done and done well. So a few weeks later my friend was passing through the area and saw no body was home, but there was a fire going to keep the house warm, owner must have been at work. So my friend climbed up onto the roof and got his chimney extension back. It was A plus, but not enough to cover everything that was installed and the time put in. Where things get funny is that once he took the extension off the chimney, due to poor drawing of air, the house started to fill up with smoke as the fire burned. The owner must have come home to a thick smoke filled home. Try getting that smell out of stuff. Nice. Probably a layer of soot on everything. To my recollection the owner did not have any pets, so no lives were harmed, but when everything you own is black and reeks like smoke and your home is freezing in the middle of winter, I bet you would have rather have paid someone for their products and services. I hate people like that. When they know from the point they hire you, no matter how good of a job you do, they will try to find some reason not to pay you. I'm a trade painter that worked for around five years essentially running a company for an owner who took a very hands off approach. He was essentially a name and working capital, not much else. After getting an offer to work for a bigger commercial company and my old boss's realization he would have to run his own company, as there really wasn't anyone else in house that was qualified, he resorted to acting like a child to try and make me stay. Made me run around the world to receive my final pay which I never even got and refused to return my tools spread throughout various jobs. Revenge time. As luck would have it another even better offer from an even bigger company ended up in my lap that wanted to subcontract me a very substantial amount of their work, but I'm going to need more employees for that. Hmm. So I go through and call each and every member of the original company and offer them a three dollar an hour raise to work for me which all of them accepted, after all they know me, they've worked for me for years, and it's more money, no brainer. They barely know the owner and what they do know, they don't like. I then asked them to grab only my tools, which was the vast majority of tools on all the jobs from their respective jobs when they leave for the weekend on Friday. Monday rolls around and my old boss is getting calls left and right from supervisors asking why nobody's at work and what's going on. He was so hands off he didn't even have employees phone numbers to call and ask them. He's essentially without employees and little to no tools to complete any jobs at this point. Fast forward six months and his company has now closed, he's lost all his work. His new addition to his house has come to a grinding halt halfway though construction, he's hurting big time. I never got my last check, but I did get a great group of workers and a company of my own, so I guess I'll just call it even. Thank you for watching Royal AI. Be sure to subscribe and hit the notification bell to receive future episodes. Share your experience in the comments or tell us what you think of these stories.