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.

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Flagship Industries, Inc.
www.ventrilo.com