BEWARE. This person advertises himself on his website (bearconsulo.com) and on various Freelance websites. I hired him on Upwork. He convinced me to release $600 as a deposit on the work he was to perform. I did so. He disappeared. No response to me. No response to Upwork mediation. They eventually refunded money I still had in escrow but offered no support for re-gaining the funds released through their site to him. This person cannot be trusted to deliver anything. BEWARE. SCAM ARTIST. read more

I wish I could rate Bear Consulo less than 1-star. I see after a year, the story is still the same. This is a long review but I feel people need to know just how bad this web designer is. I hired Bear a little over a year ago to work on a project for me. I own a website design and digital marketing company here in Los Angeles and we needed some additional help. Our company prides itself on excellent customer service and Bear made us look awful. We found his listing on Craigslist. He lived up by Sacramento and I figured that was pretty local -- same state and not located overseas. We chatted on the phone and I felt he was a great fit. Shared my same sentiments on customer service and values. My plan was to test him out on one project in hopes of giving him a lot of our overflow work. The first project I gave Bear was actually a pair of websites. This client had two divisions and wanted separate websites but with the same overall design -- just different color schemes. Bear and I settled on a price and he began designing. Initially, he sent some quick designs back -- they looked pretty amateur. The client liked it nonetheless and we began the coding/development phase. After a few weeks, I began hounding Bear for timelines. On Monday, he said "it'll be done by Friday." So I told the client that and he was excited to see his new website. On Wednesday, I noticed that nothing had been done on our development server. I emailed Bear to confirm we were still on for Friday -- never heard form him. Thursday, still no work done and I emailed him again -- still nothing. Friday morning nothing had changed and I emailed him -- didn't hear anything. In order to keep up our great image with the client, I cleared off the rest of my Friday, Saturday and Sunday to clock in and put Bear's website together. Filling in pages of content, creating sub-page design, etc. It was awful having to basically budget three days of work (and my weekend) to a project I never intended to have a hand in, reverse engineer Bear's sloppy code and deliver something -- anything -- to the client all while trying to buy time and save face. Bear finally contacted me that next Monday afternoon and explained that he had gone through some family drama. His wife had left him, taken the kids and disappeared. He supposedly spent all weekend trying to locate them with the police. He offered to send me copies of police reports -- I declined. Reports are easily fabricated so that doesn't prove much to me. He apologized profusely and said he really needed the money and asked if I had another project. In fact, he was willing to take one at a lesser rate to make up for the problem. He played to my sympathy and I gave him another, more complex project. I know, completely my mistake, but I thought this was a one-time fluke. The design phase on Project 2 was done and Bear began coding the site on our development server. In the meantime, I kicked him a third project. Bear was working on Project 2 and Project 3 concurrently. The same situation began happening. He would promise "end of the week" deadlines and then I wouldn't hear from him. I'd monitor progress on our development server and could see that Project 2 (in the coding phase) had absolutely no work being done to it. Meanwhile, the client emails are stacking up and I'm running our of excuses. Bear never even delivered a design for Project 3. Here's the direct email quote from Bear on 12/7/2015: "Definitely by end of this week, looking for sooner. You can safely tell them Friday though." I never heard from Bear again. No design was ever delivered on Project 3 and Project 2 was abandoned. That Friday I was left scrambling to put together a design for Project 3 to send the client because he "safely" assured me he'd deliver. He literally left me high and dry on these two projects without so much as another email. I started digging into Project 2 as to tackle some of the work on my own and show the client progress was being made. It was a simple Wordpress website and I couldn't find the correct stylesheet. I dug into the HTML to find the reference URL and noticed it was being stored on another server. Now I began to fume -- what was going on. I followed the URL and noticed that Bear had been farming out this project to some Filipino web designer. Wow, completely unacceptable and the precarious position it put me in to have such a critical element stored on another server oversees and at somebody else's control. Web designers use this tactic to ensure payment is received after transferring a website to your server. If you don't pay, they kill the stylesheet and your site comes down, forcing you to pay. Was the plan to shake me down for more money by holding a large client's website hostage? I'll never know. I challenged all of the money I paid Bear via Paypal and Visa, both agencies ruled in my favor and refunded me. I would never do business with Bear again. read more

i have the same story as scott d. paid him a deposit of $500 and never heard from him again. called several times - got voicemail. sent email. was told that he's "head-down" working all day and voice calls need to be scheduled. inquired about scheduling - no reply. called again. rinse. repeat. now his website is down as well. maybe he's going through personal problems. maybe he is indeed a swindler. don't know. don't care. as i've already hired another resource. enjoy your free $500, bear! read more