Took our money and failed to deliver work - issued County Court Summons
Jungle Media offered to produce a series of articles relevant to our companies products and services. The articles were to be written and published on a Monthly basis onto relevant websites. The articles would back-link to our own website and would therefore help to improve positions on search engines. We agreed a fixed Monthly amount for the work.
Jungle Media created the first articles and published them. We duly paid for the second round of articles and waited for them to be published. The invoice was paid 13th November 2013. By the week commencing 13th January 2014 the articles still had not been published and so I contacted Jungle Media and requested that they refund the money we had paid because they failed to publish the articles.
They refused to refund the money only saying that they were having problems with some of the publishers. I duly explained that this was not my concern and given that they could not provide a publication date, I wanted a refund.
I asked them to confirm if they would do this willingly or if we had to go through the process of a County Court Summons. This email was sent Friday 17th January and as we had no reply by Monday 20th January we have issued a summons.
It is clearly not acceptable to take a customers money and then hold it indefinitely on the basis that work may be completed at some future time (whilst giving no timeframe).
It is unfortunate we have had to embark on recovering our money via a legal process. A reputable business would surely accept they failed to deliver and would give a refund immediately.