Anchorage ski club isn't alone chasing funds

Nothing was overtly wrong, said Kay Jones, "(but) they weren't really good about responding to questions. You just get this feeling.''

Acting mainly on her gut, Jones terminated the association's relationship with the company called Count Me In.com.

She's glad now that she acted.

Since the Nordic Skiing Association of Anchorage last week went public with its problems in trying to collect $150,000 it says it is owed by Count Me In, a broad variety of other sports and nonprofit groups both here and Outside have revealed they, too, are having problems getting their hands on money they are due.

"Since September, they owe us about $10,000,'' said Jaime Chew of the Matanuska Soccer Club. "This summer, we started experiencing a slow turnover (of funds), but they did come up to date."

Then -- in a pattern that is all too familiar across the country -- the money just stopped coming.

Checks that were supposed to show up in the fall never arrived, said Barbara Dubovich of Campfire Alaska. She is glad the youth group only used Count Me In for limited summer programs and not for the more extensive after-school programs that begin in the fall. As a result, Campfire has thousands of dollars tied up with Count Me In instead of tens of thousands.

NATIONAL PROBLEM

In other parts of the country, a Montclair, N.J., soccer club filed suit in November, saying it is owed $142,000 Count Me In collected but never forwarded. Rich Martin of Lacrosse America in Illinois said Monday his company is owed about $200,000. About $80,000 is owed a San Diego-area softball club, according to Vince Tully of the La Costa Youth Organization in Carlsbad, Calif.

Youth soccer groups here and in Fairbanks say they are owed money in the thousands, and it appears these all might be only the tip of the iceberg.

Count Me In was not answering questions about any of this Monday. An e-mail request solicited no response. Repeated phone calls -- most of which connected only to a recording -- finally reached a receptionist, who said she would have to transfer the call to the office of company owner Terry Drayton. A message left at that number yielded no response.

Most Count Me In clients reported similar difficulties in reaching anyone at the company, but Jones, who has been trying to help the Fairbanks Youth Soccer Association collect its funds, said she did get an e-mail response from David Mackintosh, national sales manager for Arena Group, the company which owns Count Me In.

Mackintosh wrote in the e-mail "that our company is working with investors to resolve these issues and provide the necessary funds. Of course, we understand your position and are extremely apologetic."

He offered no timeline for when the Fairbanks group might see its money.

A call to Mackintosh's telephone got a recording. Martin said he faces similar problems in trying to contact the Washington-based company, though he managed to stay in touch from the Chicago area through the summer and into the fall.

"Some of the August payments were late,'' he said. "I started the phone calls. I was given a bunch of bull. I finally shut the Web site down on Oct. 15.

"They owe us over $200,000 now. We're sick to our stomachs. They have avoided calls for a while.''

Martin and his wife own a company set up to promote lacrosse in the Midwest and are now wondering how to pay bills, given the Count Me In induced disruption of cash flow. Most of the entities hit by Count Me In's nonpayments, however, are nonprofit organizations, many of them youth groups.

"I can't believe it. It's terrible,'' said Marina Len, a New York City- based attorney for the New Jersey group which sued Count Me In in the federal District Court in Seattle in November. Len said she has had a hard time trying to sort out what is going on with the company.

"I can tell you that they are basically a third-party payment processor ... like PayPal,'' she said, "and they're not paying anyone back. What I know is that my client is out money.''

Once associated with sports-giant Nike, Count Me In originally set itself up to assist "people who can't afford their own Web sites,'' Len said.

The company was to help with Web design, Web hosting and collection of fees paid on the Internet. It would make its money by pocketing $3.50 each time someone signed up for a service or joined an organization. Diane Moxness, executive director of the Anchorage ski club, said it was a good deal for several years.

"The software system that they had is great,'' she said. "It's a very robust database system. It's a whole database management system."

An easy system for keeping track of who paid for what and when was handy for the ski association, even though it hosts its own Web site. But for organizations lacking the latter capacity, Count Me In was even better.

Hosting Web sites is "one of the options they provide,'' Moxness said. "You can control what content is on the Web site. It's very useful to a nonprofit. You don't need a Web designer. You can do it yourself.''

Back in Alaska, Chew was worrying Monday whether Count Me In could go down for the count, taking the Matanuska soccer association's Web site with it.

At the moment, Count Me In is still hosting that Web site along with a variety of others, including Lacrosse America.

"We're still using their software,'' Martin said. "I don't have a choice.''

Meanwhile, he is trying to figure out the best way to try to get his money and shift to a new vendor. Others are doing the same.

"We're discussing all kinds of legal options,'' Moxness said, but the difficulty is in trying to find a way to collect the money without spending nearly as much on collection efforts.

One solution might be to file a complaint with the Consumer Protection office of the attorney general in Washington state. The office offers "an informal mediation service,'' said spokeswoman Kristin Alexander, and manages to work out about two of every three cases. And if things can't be worked out, she added, the office can pursue legal action against a business.

She refused to say whether Count Me In is being investigated as the subject of any such action, but she did say the company has two standing complaints filed against it since October and at least one remains unresolved.

"I can tell you, you're not the first person to call me today,'' Alexander said Monday.

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Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.