[jmathai]

Disclaimer: I'm not sure what the legality of this was so I'm not recommending it - but it proved effective in my case.

I was owed several thousand dollars by a client and they were several months late in making a payment. They strung me along for a while but at some point it was no longer worth my time.

Realizing I wasn't interested in any future work from the client I simply took their site down and emailed the owner asking for payment. I suspected they'd try to get the site back up (it was in their AWS account) but the owner replied right away asking for my Paypal address.

[EGreg]

I was sooo tempted to do this with a client who owed me $30K

But I was worried about getting sued by that client.

[roman030]

https://github.com/kleampa/not-paid

[charlesdm]

Yes. What he did is generally not good advice / a good course of action.

What you do is let them know you expect payment in X days, and if not start legal proceedings. And then you follow up on that.

[jmathai]

Meh. I wasn’t going to bother getting a lawyer involved for a balance of a few thousand dollars. I did threaten legal action though it proved futile.

Out of curiosity, why was it not a good course of action? Did the client have any leverage after being 6+ months past due on their payment?

[wjnc]

Lol, with all respect, taking down a companies website even with credentials given to you (for another job) can be construed as hacking. Revenge hacking can get ugly pretty quickly (criminal offence). You have a contract for X, do X and don't get paid for X. The conflict over paid for X is in a whole different ballpark than illegally using credentials for Y (taking down their site, with obvious damages as a result).

[charlesdm]

I was more referring to the $30k example above. In your situation probably fine for a few thousand, but if someone owes you a significant amount of money then I don't think you should act in this way. You just sue them (if all else fails).

[hnzix]

> then I don't think you should act in this way.

What is your rationale? Netflix suspends your account for non-payment, the same should apply to web infrastructure.

[b_t_s]

Netflix is providing a service. It's on their computer. They are certainly entitled to terminate your access to it. Logging into someone else's AWS account and deleting their stuff is, in the eyes of the law, more akin to Netflix breaking into your house and stealing your TV to stop you watching Netflix when your credit card payment is declined. Or remotely formatting all your computers to make sure you can no longer access your Netflix account. That is not the correct legal path to remedy the problem....it's a felony. It's all well and good to play hardball with people who are not paying you, but the correct way to do that is with lawyers. If you commit a felony first, then they can tell you to go pound sand and your choices are now (a) pound sand or (b) Get your 2 grand or whatever was owed, pay half of it the the lawyer, and then go to jail when they report you to the police out of spite.