My Review and Complaints About Shawn Pringle Virtual Vault

Shawn Pringle owned Virtual Vault – Top Net Solutions – CB Protect All the same company and product.

I guess at this point the most important name you need to remember is Shawn Pringle who was the owner of Top Net Solutions also known as CB Protect. Since all of his sites are POOF, gone as I’m updating this post on 05-20-17, avoiding the sites is pointless. I wonder what he’s doing now.

Well, he’s running this site. http://www.easywebvideo.com/ and he’s from Ottawa, Ontario, and went to Carleton University.

Top Net Solutions
Virtual Vault Product
www.cbprotect.com

I had been a customer of Shawn Pringle’s since April 2005 for his virtual vault e-book security software.

At first things were okay and Shawn was civil enough, but as time went by, the cracks in the customer service and tech support became obvious.

Unfortunately the arrogance I felt from Shawn came through almost every time I had the misfortune of either talking to him on the phone or via e-mail.

For example at the beginning of me signing up with him he said.. “I received your voice mail, but am unclear as to what support you wanted. We do not provide telephone support for such a low monthly fee, but do provide unlimited email support.”

Instead of just saying we prefer e-mail, he had to RUB it in and try to make me feel like I wasn’t paying enough. Why even bring it up? Perhaps his price is a lot for me being a small company, and at the time it was a lot for me. Shawn doesn’t know how many other vendors I pay out. He’s clearly NOT the only monthly expense I have.

Then he was charging me GST, but his shopping cart couldn’t break it down. Shawn lives in Canada, and he has to break the GST down on his receipt. Fine, he finally fixed that problem, but I had to point it out to him.

September of 2005 he was fine and nice to me, he must have been having a good life in that month LOL

I had one or two more glitches not being able to process keys for my business kits, and then in December of 2006 they started to have some major problems.

I had stuck with them all this time because I know that companies can have glitches, and I’m a loyal person to people who treat me right. Plus moving your kits (I don’t have one simple file, I have many files, and many kits) isn’t a 1-2-3 process, so I was staying with Top Net Solutions for now.

Around October I think, Shawn hired this new person, Jane Tanner.

In November of 2006 he sent out a notice that he was offering this newer version of his software where the customer could process their own security code just by using their e-mail address, so the code/key was now their e-mail address.

This directly affected how I process my download procedure, and so I wasn’t interested in this new version. I wanted to keep things the way they were, as I felt it was stupid to not have total control over the processing of the codes and to make the code the client’s e-mail address. So, I decided to just stay with the current version of Virtual Vault.

Throughout almost the entire month of December they had problems. Virtual Vault was down almost every few days. That wasn’t the worst of it, they did something to their redirection URL (I didn’t even know what a redirection URL was) and I had no idea what to change on my end to satisfy their change.

I’m NOT a techie, I’m an entrepreneur and I never set this up in the first place, as I had hired a techie type person do the setup for me back in 2005.

I told Shawn I needed this resolved asap, and his response was (here’s that slight arrogance again) “Although this is not part of our service, since you are a long time customer I will have Jane work with you to get it back up and running. It is a very easy change and should only take 5 minutes to setup.”

Maybe it’s not part of his service, but HE changed something on his end which I didn’t know how to change on my end, so he was partially responsible for making it so I could go about my usual business. Right?

In the meantime I had 4 customers of mine waiting for their business kits, and I was feeling the pressure BIG TIME. I had already lost one client on 12-10-2006, and trust me, that client was worth way more than Shawn’s measly software.

I chalked this up to Shawn’s growing pains because Shawn seemed nice enough about it despite his little comment, so I was happy things were going to get resolved.

Unfortunately my faith turned sour after 3 days went by, and the problem STILL wasn’t rectified. I had to sit around all day trying to get this resolved, and all I wanted to do was relax since it was almost New Years.

4 days and god knows how many pissed off and lost customers later, I was at my wits end & this is how Shawn talks to me…

“It is only not fixed because you can’t fix it. You should be able to manage your site and your thankyou URLs yourself, and your lack of knowledge in this regard is the reason it is not fixed yet. We are not your support staff for your business, and we are going over and above our normal services to get you back up and running.”

At that point I lost my temper and was screaming through the e-mail. I can’t give you the 100% details of how Shawn was responsible because this all happened 2 years ago, but basically I thought I had to redo ALL of my files/kits with their new system, when in the end all they should have had to do, was figure out why their server wouldn’t allow for a thank you page with http://

The ISSUE was their unclear communication.

I told him I was going to tell everyone my experience, and that’s when he threatened he was going to send his lawyer after me.

Shawn, you are most welcome to hire a lawyer. I can post my experiences online because I have the right to free speech. That is one of the great things about the net, one can no longer hide when their company is lacking greatly in one area. I have the RIGHT to my opinion, and while this happened 2 years ago, I will NEVER forget Shawn threatening me after I was stressed to no end trying to get my clients their kits on New Years Eve of all days.

No one has to listen to me, it’s their choice whether they wish to or not. I actually appreciate when consumers take the time out of their busy schedule to review companies. I size up the situation and get a feel what kind of person they are, and if they seem sharp & caring, I do believe them.

So anyway, back to New Years day…

I composed myself and decided to work things out with Jane & Shawn instead of moving to another company, but it was clear to me for the very first time, that Shawn didn’t really care all that much if he lost me as a client. He said he wanted to help me, but he also said:

“I will check my email in another hour or so, even though I am supposed to be on holidays (such awful customer support, I know).”

Gotta love Shawn’s sarcasm – NOT!

Shawn proceeded to make it seem like he was giving me GREAT customer service because he should really have been off having a vacation.

I told him that I’d LOVE to go on vacation, but I don’t leave my clients high and dry, and I don’t. I sat there all day and night until the problem was resolved. Amazingly Shawn never responded back to that little comment of mine.

Business Tip: NEVER EVER change something to your software around the holidays, or when you plan to go on vacation. To make customers suffer around the holiday season by making them learn or rework something entirely new just so they can service their clients, is just plain ignorant and not good business planning.

In fact I never made it to my shopping, I didn’t eat anything or drink anything for hours, and because Jane didn’t understand what was being written in my e-mails, the entire thing dragged on for days.

I realized afterwards, that if I had just talked to someone live on the phone, the entire thing could have been resolved within 15 minutes, because that’s how long it took me and my also NON TECHIE office manager to figure it out.

God forbid Shawn or Jane should break their GOLDEN rule of not calling a customer to speed things up. Instead, they have to be controlling and ONLY e-mail, especially when Jane doesn’t seem to understand plain written English very well so I had to re-explain things over and over again (see more on this later.)

In the end Jane never ended up helping me towards the end of that day, I guess it was okay that she just disappear without the problems being solved. She sent me the URLs, but they were useless to me.

If memory serves me, all I had to do was change one thing and continue to use the old system which is what I wanted in the first place.

After that MAJOR incident, I continued to deal with Jane because I had no other choice. And Shawn seemed hell bent on keeping her on despite my complaints on how terrible I felt she was as a tech support person. He even defended her once, so what was I supposed to do? I was only the customer, hell, who cares about what the client thinks.

I am pretty sure they are intimate partners or married or something, because when I asked her a couple of weeks ago if they were partners, she conveniently ignored my question, and I don’t know any real business owner who would keep on someone who is terrible at their job.

From that point on every time I dealt with Jane, I found it very very difficult to communicate with her. The more I dealt with her, the more I thought she was the most unskilled in both logic and understanding of my English. I would have to repeat myself on average 3 times, via 3 different e-mails, just to get her to understand the issue, and this didn’t just happen once, it happened about 2-3 times which may not seem like a lot, but that would be almost EVERY time I contacted her.

The only time she understood me was when I gave her a change of address.

And another thing, each time I dealt with her, I, NOT JANE, ended up figuring out the problem and fixing it unless it was on their server’s end.

I would have had even more problems dealing with her, but thank god the software didn’t go down that often.

I dreaded dealing with either one of them every time there was a problem, and I had to play it very sweet for fear something would go wrong and I would lose my temper.

There were even times when she would talk to me as if she was talking to a child, and she would also try & tell me how to run my business when I had a certain way of doing things for a reason. When the software wasn’t working and she had to test it, I would show her how my clients downloaded the kits, and she couldn’t understand my simple setup most of the time. She also complained once because she didn’t want to download the book from our server in order to test it.

Well Jane, that’s where the business kit is located. Dahhhh.

There was even one time that I misspelled the URL to the downloads page and instead of her figuring out the error, she just gave up immediately and wrote me back saying it didn’t work.

Do you know how many times a client has given me a wrong e-mail address and I’ve figured out the problem for them and informed them of their mistake? Quite a few times. That’s called being smart and going the extra mile to make a client happy.

Let’s fast forward to January of 2007.

I had purchased a new computer and I told Jane that I wanted the old version of the software.

Fine, no problem, she gave me the URL to reinstall the old virtual vault version.

Fast forward to July 27, 2008, I just reformatted my hard drive and I pulled out that same old URL and tried to download the software. It gave me a 404 page.

I had my assistant Andy e-mail her (I wasn’t going to deal with her anymore if I could help it). He did.

Jane proceeded to be “Jane“.

First she argues with Andy that I have been using the newest version since December 2006. LOL, like I don’t know what I’m using. She argues that she remembers going through all of this with my programmer.

Fair enough, she never realized that I didn’t use the new one because she doesn’t really listen to me and get what I’m saying. At this point in July I can’t remember if I ever told her I was staying with the old version, but as of January she knew very well that I had asked her for the old version and she gave me the old version. If she couldn’t remember all she had to do was READ the e-mails.

Then she says to Andy, “tough”, we don’t have the old virtual vault anymore and she tells Andy we are more than welcome to go with someone else.

Andy was SHOCKED. He couldn’t believe how she talked to him and trust me, Andy has way more patience than I do when it comes to dealing with ignorant people.

Also, when I loaded up the new one, the stats page with the e-mail addresses (remember, there are no codes anymore) was all screwed up. All of the entries said 1969.

When Andy mentioned this twice in the e-mail, Jane just ignored him, but eventually she got back to him.

Unfortunately, this client of ours we were dealing with still wasn’t able to open their product and of course Jane didn’t have an answer for the problem, but who figured it out for Jane? Andy figured it out (of course) LOL.

Neither Jane nor Shawn gave us this information when Jane gave us the NEW system, and we both (that’s 2 people) just wasted almost an hour of our time trying to troubleshoot this on our own, not to mention this makes us look unprofessional to our clients.

With their new version, when you type in the client’s e-mail address, the majority of the human population would type in regular lower case, but when we typed it into the Validate Code field, it switches it to UPPER CASE.

Turns out, I had to go back and change every single clients’ e-mail address from lower to upper and THEN type it in to the area just to give them access, otherwise they can’t log in. So this is what I had to do with every single order, waste additional time changing a client’s e-mail address from lower case to upper case.

When my assistant Andy e-mailed Jane about having to rewrite ALL e-mail addresses in all caps, she felt it was no big deal. Once again, it took 2-3 e-mails from Andy to Jane before she even understood what he was saying, so it’s clearly not just me she doesn’t understand.

How stupid can this programmer be??? I wonder if Shawn is the programmer LOL Why would anyone even code it to be like that in the first place, and seeing that this clearly isn’t “normal,” why weren’t there any instructions mentioning this?

So, looks like this version of Virtual Vault is even worse than the previous version. Even the list of everyone’s IP Address is the same and Jane still can’t figure out why all the dates say 1969. I finally let it go, as I knew I’d never get her to figure it out, let alone fix the problem.

I did ask Andy if there were any other examples of problems with Jane understanding his English, and he gave me this last one just before we switched to their new security software for e-books.

“It was regarding the file size when rewrapping.

I had emailed asking about the wrapping process. Wrapped a few files and noticed the file size had increased massively since the last time they were wrapped.

I emailed her asking if it were normal for 5MB to be added to each PDF we were wrapping. She explained that yes, every file had 5MB worth of filesize added as they wrapped the Foxxit Reader into it for people to view the files.

She said I could compress the files after wrapping to bring the file size down.

I replied explaining to her that the last time the files were wrapped, there wasn’t a size increase this large.

Gave her an example as follows:
Previously Wrapped: Original PDF size is 32kb, Wrapped and compressed it is now 2MB in size.
Newly Wrapped: Original PDF size is 32kb, Wrapped and compressed it is now 5MB in size.

Asked her if there was a 3MB file size increase in the newer versions of the wrapper.

Explained to her that one of our books with 6 files in it USED to be 5.04MB final size. With the new wrapped it came out to 21MB.

She responded with “If you can wait until the release of the update this week, perhaps it will help resolve this”

She asked if the files being wrapped were larger now (though I had already told her they were the same).

So I told her again they were mostly the same exact files, just new filenames.

She then asked me to send an old version and a new version of the unlocked file for her to test.

I did so.

She tested it… by wrapped both files with the new wrapper and concluding “I just tested both files by locking each with the same settings in Virtual Vault and they both lock to 5.04MB”.  Which we already knew…. I had been asking if the new wrapping program differed from the old, which she kept ignoring. Of course testing ANYTHING with the new wrapper would give the same file size… that was never in question.

I sent her another email explaining it again in detail, and asking my questions again.

She explained then that the old version of the wrapper included no reader, it used acrobat. They updated to include Foxit Reader since using acrobat as they were had too many security holes. She apologized and told me there was no way to reduce the file size.

Then, again told me to stay tuned next week for a new update to Virtual Vault.”

end of story…

She could have avoided wasting Andy’s time by JUST telling him right away that the old version never had the reader included in the wrap. OMG, it’s like talking to someone overseas or a little child.

Just so you know, they never fixed the ALL CAPS issue with the e-mail address, or fixed the file size issue which was really a simple fix. All they had to do was include only ONE reader with the files, NOT a reader with every file.

I was sooo anxious to find a replacement to CB Protect (Virtual Vault), that I had Andy searching high and low to find us a professional company who actually wanted our business, and understood simple written English.

We finally found one and moved over asap.

When I asked Jane to cancel my account, she never even asked why we were moving, and with her memory issues, I doubt she would remember what was said in the past telling us to LEAVE.

If I was losing a customer who had been with me for almost 4 years, I’d sure want to know why they were LEAVING!!! But then again, I care about my customers and the quality I give them.

Here is someone else’s view on Top Net Solution’s Virtual Vault – http://ds.initiated.com/2006/01/17/a-drm-that-is-gay/ (his blog is no longer around) It wasn’t a positive review.