A few of you may have heard of this guy… those of you that haven’t, you’re very fortunate. First off, let me make this post clear – Mike Smith from Blog Theme Machine is a scammer.

A few months ago, I wanted to get Wordpress themes done – I wanted to brand them and give them away for free to increase the backlinks to this blog, as link building is pretty important or so they say. Now, I wasn’t expecting master pieces, however I did occasionally find them, either from a designer that was starting out and wanted to work for cheap to build up a solid reputation, or by designers that had created themes for clients but had them not wanted so sold them at an affordable rate. I set myself a budget of $50/theme, and again, I was not expecting anything premium but took a few that looked fairly decent (see my WP Themes page) and even picked up a premium one for just $40 (the one at Vuxt.com, which I’ll be rebranding and giving away to y’all soon enough :) ).

Now, I regarded Mike as a friend at the time, which is why this is a pain – I’ve found out he’s scammed multiple people, all of whom were honest people looking to get themes done, and most of them for several hundred dollars. I myself lost $200.00 – not a small sum, especially when you’re starting off as a web entrepreneur.

One day he came to me, almost begging, saying he needed to make $300.00 before noon for ‘his girlfriend’ – tried to palm off an adult eBook to me that I wasn’t really interested in as it was low quality so I politely declined. He did run a company (and still does) called Blog Theme Machine, which offered custom Wordpress themes – I bought one from him for $40 that I was relatively happy with, and he promised me four more as well as the eBook thrown in, delivered within a week along with the eBook for $200. He sent the eBook website immediately, however I wanted the themes, as   $200 for four themes fit my budget and so I agreed and promptly sent the funds.

At that point, he went offline and despite being online (albeit away) several times and me constantly IMing him, he never replied – I gave him a week, no luck; I gave him a month, nothing; the themes were ordered on December 19th, 2007 – as you can see, it’s now March and more than three months, and I’ve got nothing to show for it except a dent in my Paypal balance. I wrote the money off as being scammed, thinking there was nothing I could do as he never replied and stopped updating his websites too.

I write this post as I see he’s back, and scamming other people too. You can also read the comments section of this review, now if it was just me, fine; but so many people cannot be wrong. The thing that shocks me is the audacity of the douchebag, even posting up his earning statistics on his website – how much of that was gained through cheating people?

I saw that he was back, scamming others and promptly sent him a very angry email, promising hell to him and his websites if he did not refund – I know people that are very capable of making someone’s life a living hell on the Internet… I decided not to do so because he’s not worth it. Scum will always be scum, and the only thing different about this one is that he’s now fairly loaded.

Anyways, here’s his details – if he contacts you, do not purchase from him as you will lose your money.

Name: Mike Smith
Email Addresses: staff@blogthememachine.com, paypal@blogthememachine.com, freefallcreative@gmail.com
Websites: BlogThemeMachine.com, FreeFallCreative.com, PSDHut.com, WordpressHut.com, KicksJunkie.com, BootstrappingBlog.com

The funny thing is that when I emailed him, he said he could not remember ever agreeing to a deal – pretty easy to say, huh? Luckily, my MSN addon automatically keeps chat logs.

Here is some proof.

As you can see, it was HIM who offered up the deal, not me. I was promised four, high quality Wordpress themes, and so far I haven’t gotten any. I do not care what he thinks his themes are worth – if you agree to a price, you go through with it or you return the money. Funnily enough, after sending him that screenshot, I’ve not heard anything from the f**kwit. I gave him till March 7th to refund me or this post was going live – it’s March 7th, and I’ve not heard anything from him so he can burn in hell.

Note, I was originally going to title this post something like ‘Douchebag of the Day or something similar, however this will help better for ranking in the search engines. If you’d like to help innocent people being saved from losing their money, help me spread the word… and link to this post with the anchor text ‘blog theme machine’.

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