Mr. S states in his claim that I tempered with his website without authorization. He also claims that 1 week of down time for a 3 week old website that spend $0 on marketing cost him tremendous damages.

Here is the Answer and the counter claim:



To the Court:

The claim filed by Mr. S of FSR should not prevail due to the following reasons:

1. There was no contractual agreement. Mr. S has no legal grounds to view an application for employment as a contract of any kind, especially when dealing with an independent contractor, even having me fill out that form was illegal since there was no employer-employee relationship as defined by the IRS.
2. The loose verbal agreement stipulated that Mr. S would pay for my licensing, at total value of $419.00, if I agreed to work for the firm. He did pay for the AREA Real Estate Academy $199.00 value, but failed to compensate me for the actual licensing $219.00 as was part of the agreement and without which the initial agreement was null and void.
3. There were no company expenditures as the company failed to provide any kind of training, support, insurance, or any other item that may be deemed as pre-paid.
4. When Mr. S attempted to conduct an illegal and unethical real estate transaction, he informed me that he would be taking the cost of the class from the commission of that transaction; thereupon I informed him of the cost of the web mastering and took down the site within 24 hours. Mr. S threatened me with a lawsuit unless I restored the site. I informed Mr. S that it will be restored 72 hours after he remits the full payment for services rendered.
5. Mr. S solicited and accepted web services from me furnishing his explicit consent to manipulate his FTP folder by providing me with all the company passwords and usernames.
6. Mr. S initially billed me $199.00 electronically, a method I do not honor, as the cost of the class. He has since, without proper justification, inflated his claim ten fold to the maximum allowed by the Massachusetts Small Claims Court.
7. Analysis of web traffic to Mr. S site indicates that 1 week of down time would not have cost First Step Realty “tremendous revenues”, or any revenues at all, due to the extremely early stages of the site development. It take’s many months and years for a website to start generating leads.