Sillykatgems’s Weblog

My name is Seann Lewis and I am the sole remaining owner of Virtual Gems Emporium. Yesterday, emails were sent out and posts made that attacked my character and the character of Virtual Gems Emporium. It was sent out by Candace Daugherty in an attempt to try and get control of Virtual Gems Emporium. These attacks are completely baseless. They show the desperate nature of the woman. When things did not do as planned instead of owning up to mistakes and mis-steps she decided to blame me and try to take control of the site by illegal means.

When we started this site it was because we had seen a unique opportunity developing. Ebay was changing many of their business practices and was in the process of alienating many of their sellers. Since Candace already had experience with selling jewelry I decided to give it a go. A business plan was drawn up and theboth of us used our funds to get the site started. I also went out on a limb and put most of the company’s financials in my name and gave personal guarantees.

We thought it best to move fast becuase the opportunity may take a while to present itself. That was the first mistake. Since I didn’t know much about how Ebay auctions should work I submitted software packages to Candy and asked her to evaluate them. That was my second mistake. Candy really didn’t look at them and we decided on a package that didn’t work out too well for us. I took full control of the customer service packages and have been very pleased with those.

After a few months and as we were struggling along we realized that we would need some help. That is when we brought in Mark Romness and Donna Canan. Both were friends of Candace and seemed like nice people. At this point I gave very explicit instructions on how to make the site more visible. I relied on others to get the job done because I have another business. That was the third mistake. A lot of the work went undone.

The software package did not work out so well. It was full of bugs and didn’t look nice. After months of trying to get it to work and lots of money spent, we went to the current software package. That was the first real breakthrough. This package is very easy to modify and the user community and customer service is great. Finally, we had an easy to manage product with great customer service. I was happy with the project and hoped that we could focus on the marketing aspect.

Marketing stalled. Honestly, nobody was looking at the site. The business plan called for us to be profitable within months and earning six figures within a year. I know that sounds outrageous but we thought that it might be possible given the climate. So in October we redoubled our efforts.

It was a disaster. The collapsing economy, coupled with Candace’s mistakes kept our numbers down. Also my own business was suffering due to the fact that Virtual Gems was taking up more and more of my time. So I started refocusing my efforts in November on my primary business SeannLewis.com. Candace wasn’t happy about that. She also was not happy with the work of some of the other members of Virtual Gems. She wanted to lock Donna out but I didn’t because we hadn’t talked to her yet.

Now around this time I got into some trouble with some bounced checks that I thought were taken care of. I didn’t do anything wrong and since Mark and I were already working together he helped me out. Also I got into a working relationship with Intel through JDMI. Things were going slowly but well.

Apparently I was the only one to think so. In November, the other members of the organization conspired behind my back to get rid of me. They setup another holdings company and stole information from ours. They asked me to make backups and used that to start the other site. I had no reason to feel that anything was amiss. I didn’t see any reason why we wouldn’t have backups in more than one location so I agreed. Now the first thing that they did was cancel the merchants account with Humboldt. According to them Mark Romness called and said tat it was decided that it was not needed and that we were going through . I am not clear as to who he said had decided that but they closed the account. Then they setup a hosting account with a local vendor in Candace’s name. They setup a whole other site and decided it was time to strike.

On the 19th of November, Godaddy sent me an email telling me that my settings had changed. I called and tried to access my account with my PIN. They said that it was invalid. I hadn’t changed my PIN since I started and couldn’t believe it. We then went through their authentication process and it failed. I panicked. I tried to access the website and couldn’t. I was almost completely locked out. Fearing the worst I accessed the database and took a look at who was listed as the  admins. t was Candace’s husband and one of her employees. I then tried to reset my my password with the email account and found that the response email was going to a Comcast account. I have Time Warner and I use hotmail for personal stuff.

I wiped the database and had to prove my case to Godaddy. That was easy enough since I had papers showing that I owned everything. They returned control to me the next day and I locked them out and canceled their email accounts. I tried talking to Candy and she gave me some BS sob story and some crap about the FBI. She asked me to give her control of the domain names. I followed up and none of it panned out. It didn’t make sense anyway. Unfortunately they did have time to backup the database and take the information. They may have also put in place malicious code to defraud customers.

Since they were not acting for the best interests of the company I asked them to simply remove my name from their site and links to the Virtual Shops sites and Virtual Gems. They asked for the domain names and decided to tell people that Virtual Shops does not exist. I asked them to recant  and when they didn’t I posted information stating theat we are still here and that the we are in no way associated with Vintage Gems. They asked me to disassociate with Virtual Gems and I gave them a price that I though th was fair. THey wanted to give me 5% of ther profits for a year but that would be stupid. They are operating under Vintage Gems Emporium, LLC and I wouldn’t make anything. 5% of nothing is nothing. The smears didn’t come until they decided to try and bully me in the court of public opinion.

There are some interesting points to ponder. The site’s traffic is steadily increasing. Our hits from search engines go up everyday. People are selling and Candy has not deleted her auctions. I could ban her but I am interested to see what their next move is. Their sites traffic i not that good and they are using software that I setup to run a rogue site and smear me. Their site informs me as to their traffic and other stats and it is not where it needs to be. A Lot of their site still links to Virtual Gems. To be honest I am a bit worn out but I will keep this thing moving. The New Year is approaching. Sales are going up and I managed to convince some jewelry stores to post their merchandise. I have some good people that I am working with and will run the site and all Virtual Store sites.

Had they just disassociated themselves I would have been fine. I don’t mind that they go off and do something else but don’t try to cut me out of what is rightfully mine.

I hope this clears up,

Seann Lewis