Eric Draven of Draven Industries - Alert?

Hi all,

I've commissioned Eric to make a KD4K in early July 2011.

This is what he wrote :


If you got your Paypal sent over this weekend, your turnaround would be roughly 4-5 weeks, because I do have orders ahead of yours...but it's hard to be exact on turnaround. It's just a quote on the time. I am gonna do a batch of those coming up so now is a good time to order.

I still don't have my knife and quite frankly, I no longer want to get it - it's taken way too long for him to deliver the goods so to say. I've emailed him over the last week using both his Hotmail and Gmail addresses, but I have yet to hear from him. I pointed him to this thread and kindly asked him to PayPal me my money back.

So he has $230 that belongs to me - looks like I got ripped off big time and so have a number of other people.

Does anyone on here know whether I can still take legal action with the BBB, even though I'm a Canadian citizen ? What can I do to compel him to refund my $ ?

I feel sorry for all of you guys who got ripped off as well.

Best regards
 
FWIW, the BBB has zero, none, nada powers to do anything. They have no ability to make judgements, enforce or collect anything on the behalf of anyone who has been ripped-off. They are just a reporting organization, but not like credit agencies, who can ruin your life.

If you used a credit card to make your PayPal payment, see if it's not too late to do a chargeback. You may as well file a complaint thru PayPal. It's too late for PayPal to get your money back, but they will eventually cancel his account if he gets enough complaints.
 
People like that disgust me!!!!! I don't blame his customers but some people really need to research the makers and check if they are reliable! If you don't want to be disappointed do your research!
 
Anyone that asks for $$$ upfront on a project is to be treated warily. A true maker never asks for $$$ until the work is done.

Anyone that that does not ship within a reasonable time an item "in stock", is subject to mail fraud proceedings.

Plain and simple....
 
I'll see what I can do about this - thanks for the above advice and info. I don't know how anyone can live with themselves knowing how many people they've ripped off. I'll contact Paypal about this and the BBB - this last won't make much of a difference, but I'm left with very little options at this time.

I think the very best thing I could do (if Carol Lawrence fails to refund me pronto) would be to post about this on as many knife forums as I know - eventually, this would likely harm his reputation to an extent. I'd hate to have to do this though, but apparently Mr. Draven doesn't mind ripping people off, so I guess that'd warrant taking this action against him, even though it's not as powerful as harming his credit status.
 
new update, After several emails, telling me a lot of bullshit, he sent me an email with pictures of the knife that I had commissioned, from that moment I haven't received more information from him, I can only say that I was stupid for not having informed enough before making the purchase..
 
Soap90 said:
new update, After several emails, telling me a lot of bullshit, he sent me an email with pictures of the knife that I had commissioned, from that moment I haven't received more information from him, I can only say that I was stupid for not having informed enough before making the purchase..
Click to expand...

I'm glad you updated your situation with Eric, because Eric has done the ''exact same thing'' to me as well - that is, after several emails and lots of BS, he showed me pics of the knife I had commissioned - he was just about to mail that knife to me and then he vanished into thin air. That was easily a month ago and I've emailed him almost on a daily basis since then, but I have yet to recieve any email response.
 
Wow. Im so glad to have read this post. Thank you all for this Valuable information. I just commissioned my very first custom knife, but luckily it was with a different knife maker. I dont really know anything about the person making my knife, which scared the hell out of me after reading this, but he seems honest so far. He sent me a couple of WIP pictures to ask my opinion on if I wanted anything changed or added in any way. He has emailed me back with answers to all my questions with a fast response time. And when I asked about payment, being my first custom knife, he told me not to worry about paying until he was done and my knife was ready to ship. This post has definitely urged me to be more careful just incase I dont get lucky next time. I truely concider myself lucky to not have been taken by a scam artist. The person whom I commissioned emailed me to offer me a custom made knife, I wasnt looking for a custom knife, I asked about payment expecting to pay up-front and he told me to pay when the job was finished. As I look back, I could have really screwed myself if he would have been a scammer.

I would like to thank you all for alerting the community about this situation. BladeForums has been an answer to my knife prayers in many ways, this being one of them. I would also like to express how sorry I am that this happened to so many people, I hope somehow this problem will be resolved for all of you. Its times like this that make me wish I were rich so I could buy a bunch of badass custom knives and send them to everbody who got ripped off. But Im broke and the best I can do is an Im Sorry. Good luck in the future.

ARES
 
John, did you ever get this resolved. I was talking to this guy about making a self defense item back in may of 2011, his pricing was way to high for grinding aluminum I thought. He was also very interested in what I was doing, that is business I was developing, more so than I'd expect from a person who wanted to make products. Have you seen his web sites????? They appear to be active....http://www.arizonacustomknives.com/Draven-Industries.aspx, and http://www.dravenindustries.com/
The second site seems to be just a resale of others products and a way to make money via advertising. The Arizona custom knives is the evolution of his orginal business I think.
Has anyone dealt with him since these threads were all posted..?????????

James
 
I've never been able to get that knife I'd commissioned him to make for me, nor did I get any of that money I sent him back. Last I heard of him, he was just about done with my knife and even asked me about certain last details as to engraving and his skull logo, so the knife in question would be just so. Then, he vanished into thin air (as usual). His Draven Industries website is down as well.

I wish I could either get that knife OR my money back.
 
I'm pretty sure ACK is NOT Draven's site... Uhm, almost positive... Others will chime in hopefully. And DravenIndustries is/was his home page for selling HIS knives.. Pretty certain..

And I don't think many here deal with him anymore.. gl with your findings... and now I will unsubscribe :D later!


EDIT:: I decided to click both links.. and the first is ACKs site and that is Dravens knives avail thru ACK. Not Eric's site. Knives that dealer bought and is still trying to sell...

The second "site" is his old domain name and now vacant. Anyone can buy it now, and what is shown is generic crap via the hosts site, has nothing to do with Draven anymore.

Draven is out of commission it appears.. OUT
 
John, did you ever get this resolved. I was talking to this guy about making a self defense item back in may of 2011, his pricing was way to high for grinding aluminum I thought. He was also very interested in what I was doing, that is business I was developing, more so than I'd expect from a person who wanted to make products. Have you seen his web sites????? They appear to be active....http://www.arizonacustomknives.com/D...ndustries.aspx, and http://www.dravenindustries.com/
The second site seems to be just a resale of others products and a way to make money via advertising. The Arizona custom knives is the evolution of his orginal business I think.
Has anyone dealt with him since these threads were all posted..?????????

James
 
HomeSafe said:
Have you seen his web sites????? They appear to be active.... The Arizona custom knives is the evolution of his orginal business I think.James
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You are incorrect as was pointed out in a previous post. Arizona Custom Knives is a purveyor website owned by Julie Hyman. Julie buy items and resells them. She bought items made by Eric and resold them. That is her total involvement with Eric. She has the same relationship with hundreds of knifemakers.

Chuck
 
Arizona Custom Knives is widely respected as "one of the good guys." They are not Mr. Draven by any measure. And it is not fair or good to drag them into this and sully their good name and reputation.

The DravenIndustries.com domain probably did belong to Eric Draven at some point; I do seem to recall it. But he lost the URL and it was bought up by a squatting company that is now using it to sell advertising hoping to capitalize on Draven Industries' good will (probably a poor investment in this case, but these sorts of operations make it up on volume). I'm sure that you could buy that domain from them if you want it. But it is also not, at this time, connected to Mr. Draven.


(Oh, and if we ever do manage to find him, Mr. Draven owes me a knife too.)
 
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I considered Eric a friend. I "only" lost $410 that I paid him for 4 small knives that we designed together (they're the ones on the left in this pic). I'm mostly sad that I spent so much time conversing with him in email, PM, text, and on the phone. The full story is here.

Shirley-Draven.jpg


John
 
Spectre said:
I considered Eric a friend. I "only" lost $410 that I paid him for 4 small knives that we designed together (they're the ones on the left in this pic). I'm mostly sad that I spent so much time conversing with him in email, PM, text, and on the phone. The full story is here.

Shirley-Draven.jpg


John
Click to expand...


Sad story indeed - what a nice friend he's proved to be. I've been bitten in the *** too.
 
So many of these tards in the knife community. Though I never dealt with Draven, I dealt with someone similar who gave folks the run around and eventually disappeared. Interesting to learn though that there still is some recourse, though I'm not sure if I'm ready to commit to legal action over a production Emerson and 240$. But yeah, it sure is difficult tracking these guys down.
 
Apec said:
So many of these tards in the knife community. Though I never dealt with Draven, I dealt with someone similar who gave folks the run around and eventually disappeared. Interesting to learn though that there still is some recourse, though I'm not sure if I'm ready to commit to legal action over a production Emerson and 240$. But yeah, it sure is difficult tracking these guys down.
Click to expand...

I remember reading about your story - to make a long story short, you and I see eye to eye on Mr. E.
 
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