Authorities are searching for possible victims after GForce Chips, an Irvine (CA) based company was accused of selling bogus automotive performance chips nationwide.

Potential victims should call the Orange County District Attorney's Consumer Fraud Hotline at 714-834-6553.

(Orange County Register, Jan. 12, 2015)

 

Reminds me of a tuner, Mick Stevens (mseven), on these Corvette boards scamming people offering to tune your Corvette via e-mail datalogs and having members pay him upfront. Then Mick ended up not really tuning much by claiming he was busy taking care of ill family members and refused to refund the money he already charged them for the future tuning. Which is called stealing.

Also Mick used the excuse at times to not refund the money trying to claim you bought a "performance chip" that was some custom generic tune that Mick sent to you to use to start the datalogging process for tuning and so trying to claim you didn't pay for any "tuning".

Mick Stevens (mseven) has scammed a lot of members on this board!

 

I had no idea Mick was a crook. I thought he was a little eccentric, sure, but a crook... damn...

As for GForce, I am not associated with them at all.

 

So has Hypertech, Jet, ADS, etc...

 

Someone contacted me (unsolicited) by pm telling me he could tune my car - all after i posted about how i had mastered a 2 bar map tune, on my own, for my supercharged 93.

Rolleyes

note: there were others here doing fradulent tunes too at one time

 

Mick Stevens (mseven) ripped off a lot of members on here. Mick used to have a good rep on here for tuning, but at some point Mick broke bad and started stealing peoples money. Mick would take your money promising to tune your car to fix whatever problem you were having by sending you a new file every week till the tuning was completed. After Mick had your money, he didn't do much tuning and people starting asking for their money back and Mick refused. Some waited 6 months, others a year or closer to two years before asking for their money back. As Mick had been claiming his delay to tune your car was because he was taking care of an ill family member. But I don't think Mick taking care of an ill family member was true.

Mick charged $175 upfront for a custom tuning, so not cheap.

Some who got scammed wrote on here about Mick stealing their money, and Mick told them that he'd refund their money only if they removed their posts. But lots of others like me didn't get our money refunded as Mick refused to.

Mick had also told some members who had hired him to tune their car that if they talked on here about him stealing their money, that he would take some sort of action.

It's actually worse than that if you had been talking to Mick listening to his crap and excuses. Not only that but several members cars were down for like a year or two waiting on Mick to tune their car that Mick never ended up tuning.

 

Wow A lot happened in the last couple years I was not active here. Not saying you did not get ripped off or anything else, just saying when I talked with Mick for hours on the phone maybe 2 times back in like 2010 or so he was not trying to rip me off or get any money from me. In fact when I mentioned Bjankuski lives by me he said yep I would have him do it then.

No excuse for what you rare describing but if that is the case something must have happened in life to him. Seemed like a straight guy to me at the time.

Again I am not sticking up for him or saying anything in regards to your story I am just completely floored to hear it and could not imagine it with out hearing it. Hope this ends well for all involved.

 

Mick talked up a good game BEFORE he had your money, but after he had your money he would hardly respond back to you. 6 months could go by with no response. Then when he responded back say 6 months later for example, he acted like you were bugging him to tune your car saying stuff like your "car will get tuned when it gets tuned" and telling you to quit bothering him about tuning your car claiming he was taking care of an ill family member. BS crap like that.

But it was going on when Mick was allegedly taking care of an ill family member. I remember him taking care of one ill family member for a LONG time, and then he claimed that person had died, and then he had another ill family member he had to start taking care of. It was just excuses that never ended and people started asking for their money back.

I don't know what was going on with Mick, with him dragging out the tuning, but that made a lot of people mad as their projects were on hold waiting for a tune. But it got real serious when Mick refused to refund peoples money so they could use that money to go hire a different tuner.

I remember a while back when Mick was selling one of his cars on here. There was a post in that thread asking Mick if he was going to use that money to pay back the people he had ripped off here with regards to his tuning. But that post got removed I guess by Mick.

 

NOW THE REST OF THE STORY...........
Dear Mr Josh Wilson,

You have changed your user name again I see.....no problem

Aside from my family problems which I don't give a rats *** if YOU believe me, or that both of my parents had bad health issues and passed within a year and a half of each other.

Regarding your tune,
I explicitly told you to check several things including fuel pressure of which I was told by you that you had no means of doing these things. I also told you that the injectors you were using would be problematic, and that I would do what I could do.....you said fine. Combine the facts that you wouldn't do your end, I STILL GAVE YOU A GOOD TUNE.

At that point you chose to not contact me for at least 8 months and expected at that time that I would continue tuning your car. Of which I did a couple more go rounds and it was good.
Your tune was FINE with blm,s of 126-132 and a total of 3 knock counts. I told you it was good and you chose to decide differently. You stated it had too many knock counts but asked me if some "clanging" sound could cause this ....of which I SAID YES !! Yet you wanted to insist on me continuing tuning, despite your mechanical issues.....and that I should be able to fix your mechanical problems in the tune. You asked for a refund which I refused, because I had done my part.

NOW. I have every tune I had sent saved along with all of your data logs, and all the emails. which amount to approximately 12 or so, and for a completely stock car that is quite a bit. You are on the border of slander and to continue would only show your complete ignorance.
only you........ which is called slander
I REMEBER THAT BECAUSE YOU POSTED IT !!!!
btw I removed no posts....I'm sure your that your unwarranted bashing did it by itself.

in memory .....RACE ON

 

 

Mick,

Your statements are very inaccurate. I'm not going to correct all of the inaccuracies. But for example fuel pressure was correct with the adjustable FPR at 44 psi and it had Bosch III FIC injectors like what everyone uses here. Don't know what you are talking about there

Keeping it brief. On the 8 month thing you mention. After you got paid, you always had real long delays in responding back and always blamed family issues on that when you were supposed to send a new tune file back once a week and would make comments about how you had more important things to do than tuning peoples cars, etc.

At one point you had quit responding to messages asking for the next tune file and 6 months went by with no response back after several messages sent. So after a 6 month gap I asked for my money back so I could get a different punctual tuner. After that refund request you finally responded back after 6 months and ended up refusing to refund my money. You said you had better things to do, like tend to family, than to tune my car and told me to not contact you again about tuning my car.

Also, you never even fixed the issues you were supposed to fix as I could tell from looking at the datalogs. But on that last tune file you sent, I sent some datalogs to other tuners who said your tune was way out of whack. i.e. real high BLM's. I also sent that last tune .bin file itself to a tuner who opened it up and said your tune was a mess because of all of your "performance mods" you put in that I had previously told you that I didn't want i.e. 200+ "performance" changes. He told me to not drive with that tune. So I ended up having to ditch the mess tune you abandoned and went back to the stock tune and I fixed the simple tuning issues myself.

Anyways the details on my tune doesn't matter as you ripped off several members here with regards to your lack of tuning and attitude about it. Not just me but several others here have claimed you ripped them off too. Though some were able to get a refund from you.

If you have on going family issues that you are more interested in dealing with than doing a job that you were paid to do. Then the right thing to do is to refund the money instead of keeping it. The job I paid you to do was never completed and ended up being a big waste of time and money. Also originally I had planned that after your tune was complete, that I was going to have you remove all of those 200+ performance changes that you say you put in all of your tunes and turn that back to stock. But I never got the chance to do that because you never completed the tune.

 

You think that $175 is "not cheap"?? Yikes. I'd say that is incredibly reasonable for custom tuning.
I paid way more than that for a 10 minute, WOT-only dyno tune that got me (maybe) 5 hp on my C6. My point with that statement about the C6 is that "tuning", a "tune" is a subjective thing; there are many different ways to accomplisha "tune" and one tuner's method will almost definitely be different than another's....which leads to the inevitable: one tuner will almost always criticize the way another tuner does something. So, there is a risk when you pay a tuner to tune for you -he may not do it the way YOU want it done...which is why people learn to tune for themselves. "If you want it done right, do it yourself". You took a $175 risk, it didn't work out. I took a $250 risk and all I wanted was better throttle response. That didn't work out. What did I learn? NOT to hop up and down and have a hissy fit at the tuner, but that next time, I'd buy the equipment and do the tuning myself.

We all "get it" that you're upset about the way a transaction turned out between you and him. Further posting now is making you look like a fanatic.

I've always found mseven to be a stand up guy and a knowledgable contributor to this forum. I think he's an asset.

.

 

mseven is a good guy. Tuning remote is a hard thing. I dont see him ripping anyone off. Maybe giving up when the tune does not not work for some reason but I dont believe he is a thief. You can only do so much when you cant put your hands on the car. Never know what the owner has actually done to the car. Maybe the plug wires are crossed. Maybe valves too tight. Never know when you dont have the car.

 

I must have poor judgement cause Id hand Mick and one other member here who Ive NEVER MET in person the keys to my place, car pin # to my bank card carte blanche. Hes one good **** you got him ALL wrong.

Hes done a lot of favors, freebies, bro favors for members here ;never says a word about it nor pats himself on the back-and now "this"....wonder why he moved on?

A tune is a tune and one cant reap the full benefits from it if something else is amiss with the car.

 

mseven has helped numerous members on this forum. I remember decades ago after a major mod on my C4, I drove down to SoCal and had an outfit called Turbo City put the car on their dyno and provide a custom tune. I drove back and it didn't feel right. Got home and saw a vacuum hose to the hvac system disconnected. My bad. The tune and 10 hours of driving and I can't remember how much $$ got thrown out the window. It was my fault, not theirs. I certainly didn't ask for a cent back. Moral of the story, if a car is not right, it can't be tuned. In this case, eat it and move on.

 

And somewhere in here, lies the truth...

 

BUT, it seems only person is stepping up about Mseven. I'm not in the middle but I'd say this is proof it's a personal thing more than a reputation thing. I am a small business owner and one thing I know is you can not please everyone, also people are human and even if some of these things happened it's possible it was sue to major life situations. $175 is not taking place over my family or whatever, and I would hope who ever gave it to me what not expect it to. I think something could have been worked out, also maybe like others pointed out to the person it is not normal for Mick to act this way after all the interactions he has here so must be more to the story.

Mick hope all is well.

 

I payed Mick to do my tuning a couple of years ago. I got eight updates and he answered a lot of questions. He pointed me in the right direction and that led me to finishing my tune (and the constant changes - haha).
He told me about the family issues, and maybe I'm just gullible, but I believed him and I still do. I left him alone to tend to his life. He gave me many hours of phone help. I got my $175 worth.
I hope you are well Mick.

Maybe I am just old fashioned or naive but I always give folks the benefit of the doubt until they prove me wrong. I also help everyone I can. If Mick has bad intentions (which I doubt) he will have his day. That's not my place to judge.

 

I agree. As an outsider I see this as
If mseven was such a scammer where are all of the upset forum members? Surely if he were as unscrupulous as he is being purported to be many others would jump on this post saying so.
Many respected members are stating just the opposite and that he is a stand up guy that goes beyond one would expect.
It looks to me like someone just wasn't happy and hijacked someone else's thread to launch a personal smear campaign. Keep it personal, between you and him. No need to bring it here.

 

That's it!!!! You're all on the List now....